MacLaren Art Centre

Slow Sight highlights the striking affinities in sensibility and style of artists Itee Pootoogook (Cape Dorset, Nunavut) and Tim Zuck (Lafontaine, Ontario). Each demonstrates an objective eye and steady hand, resulting in classicizing images of places, people and things, observed at intimate proximity. Each artist works from photographic sources to achieve a contradictory removal from familiar scenes. This ambiguity contributes to the allure of their art. Pootoogook’s and Zuck’s images might be classified as landscape or still life, yet insistently transcend such generic associations. Both artists push the commonplace and factual to the forefront, where it becomes modestly iconic.

Itee Pootoogook (born 1951) is from the third generation of a famed family of Cape Dorset artists. Before he took up drawing in the last decade, he was a carpenter. Pootoogook’s first solo show was held in 2010 at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto. Most recently, his drawings were featured in the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition, Inuit Modern (2011). Tim Zuck (born 1947) is a renowned Canadian realist. Zuck completed his BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He returned to NSCAD to teach from 1972 to 1979, and joined the faculty of the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2001. He has exhibited extensively and his works are in numerous important collections. Tim Zuck is represented by Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto.

Reception: Thursday, June 14, 7:00 to 9:00 pm