March 9 – April 27, 2024
(Main Gallery)

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann | Linh Nguyen | Leisa Rich | Peggy Taylor Reid

BLOOM, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Lonsdale Gallery is pleased to present BLOOM, a spring themed group exhibition featuring four talented female artists: Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Linh Nguyen, Leisa Rich, and Peggy Taylor Reid. BLOOM brings together a diverse range of mediums – photography, mixed media fiber-based art, and painting – that incorporate botanical and floral motifs in fresh and innovative ways.

The exhibition explores nature and it’s cycles of rebirth and renewal through a female lens. Celebrating it’s beauty, strength, and resilience. Going beyond the beatific, the exhibition takes inspiration from the splendor and diversity of forms found in nature, pervasiveness of natural world, and it’s relationship to the body.

Dried flowers beyond their prime take a new life in Linh Nguyen‘s dandelion dancer series. Nguyen photographs dandelions, and other wild flowers, to form graceful figures in motion to explore themes of resilience, healing and freedom. Her images capture the innate beauty and hidden poetry found in common weeds and native local flowers. They serves as a poignant reminder that weeds continue to grow and thrive, even in the most inhospitable environments. By repurposing dried weeds and floral debris Nguyen invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences: our perceptions surrounding beauty; the importance of self-love; finding stillness in an increasingly chaotic world; and how shift ones perspective to look forward towards a future full of adventure and possibilities.

Linh Nguyen
Dandelion Dancer 5
2022
c-print, edition of 3
24 x 18 inches (framed)
$850

Linh Nguyen
Dandelion Dancer 6
2023
c-print, edition of 10
16 x 14 inches (framed)
$625

BLOOM, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Peggy Taylor Reid’s Foraged/Cultivated series, of luminous alternative process phytotype photographs transforms foraged wild plants and domesticated vegetation into striking intimate compositions that radiate with an inner light. Their glowing golden yellows, rich hues of ochre, and deep blacks evoke memories of the 2023 summer wildfire season; where millions of hectares across Canada where ravaged and smoke blanketed Ontario for multiples days. Taylor Reid’s images conjure up images of fire, and serve to highlight our inseparability from nature and our environment.

Peggy Taylor Reid
Foraged/Cultivated 1-12
2023
phytotype photograph
ed. of 1, unique photograph
8 x 7 inches (framed)
$650 (each)

Phytotypes are an alternative camera-less process that solely uses plant matter to create a photosynthetic photographic image. It demands direct physical contact with the raw materiality of the subject matter: crushing the plant to produce an organic extract, coating paper, arranging various wild foraged florae onto the surface, then exposing it to sunlight. Over time the sunlight changes the color and intensity of the plant extracts, resulting in a unique one-of-a-kind image that embodies the perfect alchemic marriage between earth and sky.

Peggy Taylor Reid
Foraged/Cultivated 15
2023
phytotype photograph
ed. of 1, unique photograph
11.15 x 9.75 inches (framed)
$750

BLOOM, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Leisa Rich
Biking The Beltline
2020
materials: heat transfer paper, ink, dyes, thread, vinyl, fabric, paper techniques: photography (artist own), free motion embroidery, collage
21” x 13.5 inches (each)
$5,000 (full suite) | $1,200 (each)

Fiber sculptor and mixed media artist, Leisa Rich builds elaborate three-dimensional free motion embroidery works created using assorted fabrics, vintage textiles, dyes, appliqué, and hand painting. As an accomplished fibre artist, Rich is able to reveal the hidden potential and creative possibilities of raw materials. She weaves these various elements together to produce eye-catching fibre paintings that transport the viewer into a world filled of imagination, discovery, and dreams.

Leisa Rich, Charm & Shimmer (detail), 2024

Rich creates her sumptuous fibre works using free motion embroidery techniques. The process involves using a sewing machine to “draw” or “paint” with the thread. Rather than feeding the fabric through the sewing machine “teeth”, which help stabilize and guide the top and bottom threads, the artist uses the needle as a paintbrush and the fabric as the canvas. The needle does most of the work, but the artist does all of the creativity. The physical act of leading and guiding the material to achieve the desired patterns and forms can be seen as an intricate dance between the artist and their materials. What it produces are unique one-of-a kind three-dimensional pieces practically bursting at the seams with energy and vigour.

Leisa Rich
You Have Stolen My Heart 
2023
materials: fabric, recycled clothing, dyes, thread.
techniques: free motion embroidery, dyed, applique.
46 x 40 inches (framed)
 SOLD

BLOOM, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Katherine Tzu Lan Mann
Mountainal 2
2019
acrylic, sumi ink and collage on paper
45 x 55 inches (unframed)
$5,000

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s abundant and densely layered large-scale paintings on paper explore natural cycles, oscillating between void and abundance, chaos and order, chance and control. An American artist of Taiwanese decent, Mann draws inspiration from her early childhood training in traditional Chinese landscape painting to create a fantastic abstract vision of the natural world. Her practice is rooted in the question of how painting can capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms. 

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann
Untitled (blue)
2014
acrylic, sumi ink and silkscreen on paper
$2,500

BLOOM, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor