At Home in the World at Towards

Artists: Sarah Cale, Khalil Jamal, Vincent Larouche, Les Ramsay

Exhibition title: At Home in the World

Venue: Towards, Toronto, Canada

Date: July 26 – August 17, 2019

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

Towards is pleased to present At Home in the World, a group exhibition featuring the work of Sarah Cale, Khalil Jamal, Vincent Larouche, and Les Ramsay.

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What becomes of the spaces we create? How do they frame the material, political, and social fabric of our lives? How do we shape them, knowing that in they in turn will mold us?

Using the permeability of space as a starting point, At Home in the World brings together four artists to examine ideas of domesticity, the psychological and the physical, as well as slippages between literal and figurative space.

Les Ramsay’s work draws upon a wide range of often idiosyncratic source material that the artist has collected over many years. Spanning art history, craft, popular imagery and folk art, his work collapses traditional distinctions between high and low while further expanding upon the historical and formal language of painting. His often expansive canvases create complex environments where seemingly disparate elements co-exisit, intermingling in a kind of productive entanglement that doesn’t privilege any singular reading of the work.

For Khalil Jamal, questions of space take a structural and functional turn. Space is organized, form is created, and systems are put into place. Elements exist as both singular objects but also as part of a larger whole. Trained as an industrial designer, his work speaks to a type of domestic space, while simultaneously raising questions of production, materiality, and playfulness.

Sarah Cale’s work can be read as an investigation in an intersection of painting and collage. Her layered canvases are built up of “secondhand brushstrokes” where paint is first applied to a temporary surface, allowed to dry, and then re-assembled into highly intricate compositions. This layering creates rich, tactile paintings’ where surface, colour and form oscillate back and forth with one another. Through this process, Cale reconfigures many of paintings long-established concerns – interrogating ideas of materiality, gesture, as well as the pictorial representation of space.

Similar to Les Ramsay, Vincent Larouche’s paintings also draw from a vast personal collection of source material. Working across a diverse range of scales, styles and subject matter, Larouche’s work is really an investigation into the multitude of ways in which we construct images. The paintings within At Home in the World speak to what might be referred to as “liminal space” – the space between “what was” and “what comes next”. These are spaces of flux – where elements are in transition and all outcomes remain possible.

The artists within At Home in the World share an interest in a certain type of “borderless space.” Lines blur, territories shift, and histories overlap. It is within these borderless spaces they create, that a world of possibility exists.

Sarah Cale is a Canadian visual artist based in Brussels, Belgium. Her work as a painter is known for its investigations in an intersection of painting and collage. She received a BFA from the Nova Scotia Collage of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. In 2009 and 2010 she was shortlisted for the Royal Bank of Canada painting award, and has been awarded numerous grants and residencies. Recent solo exhibitions include, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto (2018); The Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2016); Kitchener Waterloo Gallery, Kitchener (2015); Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto (2015); Anna Leonowens, Halifax (2015); and the The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2014). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Towards Gallery (2019); McIntosh Gallery, London (2019), Galerie McClure, Montréal (2018); The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Galerie UQAM, Montreal (2013); Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2012); Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012); the Power Plant, Toronto (2010); and Musée D’Art Contemporain, Montréal (2009). She currently teaches at La Cambre in Brussels.

A Vancouver expat residing in Toronto, Khalil Jamal is an industrial designer with experience in public art and architectural products. He experiments with new and old materials and fabrication processes to create housewares, hardware and large-scale installations.

Vincent Larouche lives and works in Montréal, QC. Recent solo exhibitions include Bouches de Cendres Actives, at Soon.TW (Montreal 2019); Dog Tag, at Bunker2 Projects (Toronto 2018); and Sandcastle Staircase, at RYAN LLC (Montreal 2018). He is currently working towards a solo exhibition set to open in the fall of 2019 at New Works in Chicago, Illinois. Vincent Larouche is a 2019 grantee from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. He holds a B.F.A. with double distinction from Concordia University (2019)

Les Ramsay was born in Vancouver and studied fine arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and completed his MFA in Painting at Concordia University in 2015. He has taken part in group and solo shows such as A Motion for a Notion Commotion, presented at Chernoff Fine Art in Vancouver (2018); The Adventures of Atrevida Reef, presented by Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal (2019); Li Salay, Indigenous group show at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton (2018); Border X, at Winnipeg Art Gallery (2016), The MacKenzie (2018), AGA (2019); and Keep the Glove at Sunset Terrace in Vancouver (2014). He also curated his first group show titled The Sun Poured in like Butterscotch at Projet Pangee, Montreal (2019). His works can be found in many private and corporate collections such as The Claridge Collection, Medcan, the TD Bank and RBC collection. He has exhibited in Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, as well as in the US.