Sherry Czekus | Block Party
June 13 - 29

Reception: Saturday, June 13 @ 3 - 5 pm
Pre-sales begin June 6 @ 10 am, online, over-the-phone, or in-person! If you would like to view works in person before the exhibition opening dates, please contact the gallery.
613-729-0003 or info@wallspacegallery.ca

RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is proud to present, “Block Party”, the latest solo-exhibition by painter Sherry Czekus. Her near colour-block approach and use of negative space in the portrayal of ‘crowdscapes’ breaks away from realistic representation into the tenuous tensions between colour and form. Czekus is ultimately fascinated with the organic fluctuations and movements within gatherings, and the moment when individual identity collapses into a larger collective presence.

Her aerial views of pedestrian motion break from her usual use of first-person perspective, instead placing us in the position of unseen observer floating above her scenes. In Look Up 1 and Look Up 2, this removal from the sense of being included in the crowd creates a calming space of separation, like standing still and feeling a river flowing around you. Though Czekus pares down her forms into blocks of colour, she maintains the subtle presence of the painted mark, and ultimately of her own hand, in the soft blends, transparencies, and directional brushwork that build or dissolve her figures. The works are deeply grounded in questions of painting and its ability to represent, in gesture, colour, and form, the bodily experience and pace of the urban ‘flanneur’.

"Making my paintings begins with becoming one of the crowd as part of the everyday experience. On busy city sidewalks with my camera, I make my source images of the urban crowd and its figurative gestures, intersections and spaces between its members."

- Sherry Czekus

"The colour contrast of paint, its thickness and thinness, opacity and density, layering and scraping away are material ways the medium exerts its influence on the image and the reading of the work. The way the paint becomes caught up in the tooth of the canvas mediates the tension between the speed of the movement of the figures and the slowness of the act of painting. Straddling the boundaries of representation and abstraction, I allow the photographic language give way to the language of painting."

- Sherry Czekus

Czekus’ oil paintings draw on the sensory. Each crowd depicted by Czekus expresses the sense of community and liveliness felt when engaging in social environments. Her use of bright, enticing hues echoes the bubbling laughter, footsteps, and chatter of group gatherings. She transforms her subjects into avenues of colour, simultaneously defining them from one another and flattening them into interlocking rhythms of movement. 

- Tiffany April, Curator

Block Party Catalogue

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Sherry Czekus is a Canadian painter who completed her MFA at University of Western Ontario in London, ON and a Bachelor of Art with Fine Art Studio Specialization at University of Waterloo. The public domain, specifically the city, is a site of observation of urban crowd culture and its participants that Czekus explores through painting. She lives in Waterloo, ON with her family, her dog named Danni and cat named Charlotte.