Fast Forward

Drake Commissary, Ongoing

Featured artists: Alex McLeod, Kendra Yee, Adrian Esparza, Dahae Song, Court Gee + Kevin Connolly Our evolving exhibition Fast Forward draws inspiration from the Junction Triangle’s industrial roots and creative community, looking into the future and the past simultaneously.

ALEX MCLEOD - ANCIENT HILLS, 2017 Alex's 35 ft digital mural extends the length of Drake Commissary, with exquisite detail and created using a variety of 3D modeling software, the piece is a densely detailed fantasy landscape that evolves through urban to rural elements, through night and day. McLeod’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada, the US, Brazil, Japan and New Zealand. Here in Toronto, his works are held in the collections of TD Bank, Bank of Montreal and Museum of Contemporary Art. He’s been featured in The Creator’s Project, Canadian Art Magazine, Globe and Mail and Kanye West’s blog.

KENDRA YEE - THE ONLOOKING, 2018 Emerging artist Kendra Yee's bright blue sculptural pieces sit energetically in the cabinets. Her work often merges figures and abstraction, in a style that is playful and off-beat. Yee's The Onlooking may remind you of characters in a book or play – self-invented landscapes and fantasy figures (like clowns and witches) bring to mind real world conversations about bodies and personal relationships.
Some of her recent exhibitions include: take your legs and your shoes (Drake Hotel group exhibition, 2017) and Come Up To My Room (2018) at the Gladstone Hotel.

ADRIAN ESPARZA - Opened, 2017 Mexican-American artist Adrian Esparza has created a site specific textile installation for the back wall, based on the thread of sarapes - traditional Mexican blankets - re-envisioning craft with forced perspective. Esparza’s work has shown in many important international exhibitions including Istanbul Biennial-Untitled, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. His work is in the collections of the Perez Miami Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Rubins Center for the Visual Art.

DAHAE SONG - Objects of Affection, 2017 Dahae’s gestural paintings can be found directly on select table tops throughout the dining room, blurring the lines of traditional exhibition spaces. Song is a South Korean, Toronto based interdisciplinary artist. Her work is concerned with the digitization of human existence and expresses the intersections and the symbiotic relationship between physical and virtual worlds. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto and NYC and featured in Fader Magazine.

COURT GEE - Fun Flowers, 2019 Court Gee is a Toronto based artist, and holds a BFA from OCAD University (2018). Subverting function with wry humour, Gee uses readymade and craft based materials to create comedic, and often absurd, installations. Responding to the ‘landscape’ of the site, these materials are purposefully positioned, with the tropes of formal presentation in mind, to resist their intended use. Because of this, these works often read as objects out of place. Gee is the recipient of the Robbie Award, the Aureade Falconer-Girard Memorial Award, and the Catherine Daigle Scholarship.

KEVIN CONNOLLY - Xiphoid Process, SONG (after Walt Whitman), part 52 Teaming up with our Sterling Rd. neighbour House of Anansi Press, we'll feature an excerpt of poet Kevin Connolly's Xiphoid Process on a vintage lightbox in the back lounge. Connolly, who teaches in the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA program, has published three books of poetry with Anansi, with another, Xiphoid Process, having just come out in April. He is a Trillium Poetry Prize recipient and has been a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award. He has served as a poetry board member for past three years with McClelland & Stewart, and was poetry editor at Coach House Books from 2008–2013.