Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven at COOPER COLE

Artists: Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven

Exhibition title: Hey Mars

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: July 9 – August 15, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Hey Mars, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of New York-based artist Rachel Eulena Williams and Toronto-based artist Scott Treleaven.

Rachel Eulena Williams works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions. Some works in this exhibition take this to the extreme: sprawling across the walls resembling assemblages more than canvases. In others, Williams pulls these shapes back into the frame, creating sculptural works that push out of the two-dimensional plane. Williams’ vibrant use of colour represents a critique of, and liberation from, Western art history’s ‘othering’ of colour, and its categorization as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. The artist embraces those colours marginalized by the chromophobia of the West, which defined them as both dangerous and superficial.1 Williams’ distinctive works question these restrictions placed on colour and shape, as well as how virtuosity is defined.

Scott Treleaven’s work is engaged with themes of perception, embodied mysticism, and queer alterity, aiming to re-locate abstraction as part of a transcendental, rather than purely formal, tradition. Using established aesthetic prompts, from pop psychedelic gestures to the arrangement of Neolithic stone sites, Treleaven’s paintings act as portals into ecologies of visual language and symbology, conveying ideas of sublimity and the ecstatic. The works begin with a representational image, which is responded to as a field of markings rather than a picture – unpremeditated strokes and gestures are added, allowing the elemental exuberance of the paint to perform, letting the original conception come apart. The paintings in this exhibition resemble microcosms of richly coloured minerals or galaxies. No one gem-hued shape/organism is a focal point; their interconnectedness is the object of study. Treleaven—who has worked in film, collage, photography, and sculpture— brings distinct tensions to the painting field: unlike a photographic image, the linearity of film, a line of text, or the circumambulation required to activate a sculpture, painting unfolds in its own unique temporal and psychological space; not as a transcendent object in itself but as a point of departure.

Williams and Treleaven share an interest in questioning the formal boundaries of painting. Through their own distinctive approaches to the medium and its history, both artists search for that which is not easily defined, fixed, or part of the visible, earthly world. Instead, they delve into the imagery of the ulterior.

Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven, Hey Mars, 2020, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto

Rachel Eulena Williams, Untitled Drawing, 2017, Acrylic, and colored pencil on paper, 15″ X 12″, 38.1cm X 30.48cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Headspace, 2019, Etching ink and acrylic on paper, 22″ X 15″, 55.88cm X 38.1cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Hey Mars, 2019, Acrylic, various ropes, canvas, on wood panel, 55″ X 35″, 139.7cm X 88.9cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Patterns of distance together, 2019, Acrylic, dye, canvas and rope on wood panels, 58″ X 52″, 147.32cm X 132.08cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Plum and water 2, 2019, Etching ink and acrylic on paper, 22″ X 15″, 55.88cm X 38.1cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Plum and water, 2019, Etching ink and acrylic on paper, 22″ X 15″, 55.88cm X 38.1cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Sunburn of the abundant earth, 2019, Etching ink and acrylic on paper, 22″ X 15″, 55.88cm X 38.1cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, Round and round, 2020, Acrylic, rope and canvas on wood panel, 24″ X 24″, 60.96cm X 60.96cm

Rachel Eulena Williams, To look down the sea, 2020, Acrylic, dye, canvas, and rope on wood panels, 63″ X 110″, 160.02cm X 279.4cm

Scott Treleaven, Jackson Heights Cinema Syncretism, 2019, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 25.6″ X 21.3″, 65.02cm X 54.1cm

Scott Treleaven, Coney Island Das, 2020, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 30″ X 24″, 76.2cm X 60.96cm

Scott Treleaven, NiteNiteKissKissLoveLove (for Gen), 2020, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 60″ X 48″, 152.4cm X 121.92cm

Scott Treleaven, The Roaring Stream, 2020, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 48″ X 36″, 121.92cm X 91.44cm

Scott Treleaven, To Dispel the Misery of the World, 2020, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 38″ X 36″, 96.52cm X 91.44cm

Scott Treleaven, Wish-Fulfilling Jewels (for J.Giorno), 2020, Acrylic, gouache and permanent crayon on canvas, 60″ X 48″, 152.4cm X 121.92cm