(De)Generate

May 1 to 31st
Opening reception Saturday May 4th, 3-5pm (rain day Sunday)

Anthea Baxter-Page
Claudette Abrams
Eliza Moore
Gaye Jackson
Michael Dewdney
Rick/Simon

Curated by Kate Lawler-Dean, Studio Little Red

(De)Generate investigates the dichotomy of generate (cause to arise or produce) and degenerate (having lost or evidence of decline).

Each of these Toronto Island based artists interprets the opposing concepts individually or in relation to another. As part of an aging community living within urban parklands, each artist explores marks, patterns or memories we carry as well as those we leave behind. Studying the effects of our existence on our environments through themes of physical deterioration, consumption, artifacts and synchronicity. Both manmade materials and nature’s impact on us; ever evolving and deteriorating through time creating echoes we recognize from within.

Exhibited outdoors as a collective of individual freestanding vitrines and on a residential home mapped around Ward’s Island.

CONTACT Exhibition Page

EXHIBITION

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ANTHEA BAXTER-PAGE
Rejuvenation 2024, Things We Left Behind (Wings) 2010 & Growth 2024
Archival Digital Print
8" x 6"

*Available in other limited edition sizes

ANTHEA BAXTER-PAGE
Creation 2024, Beauty 2024 & Things We Left Behind (Wings) 2010
Archival Digital Print
6" x 8"

*Available in other limited edition sizes

CLAUDETTE ABRAMS
Equivocalence 01 Expand and Collapse
Archival Pigment Print
17” x 23” (framed)
2024

*Editions of 20, in variable sizes, available as single and paired images

CLAUDETTE ABRAMS
Equivocalence 02 Cause and Effect
Archival Pigment Print
17” x 23” (framed)
2024

*Editions of 20, in variable sizes, available as single and paired images

CLAUDETTE ABRAMS
Equivocalence 03 Cut and Cover
Archival Pigment Print
17” x 23” (framed)
2024

*Editions of 20, in variable sizes, available as single and paired images

CLAUDETTE ABRAMS
Equivocalence 04 Raze and Rebound
Archival Pigment Print
17” x 23” (framed)
2024

*Editions of 20, in variable sizes, available as single and paired images

ELIZA MOORE
Prickly Pain No. 1
Digital Print
9” x 7” (image), 14” x 11” (frame), Edition of 3
2024

ELIZA MOORE
Prickly Pain no. 4
Digital Print
9” x 7” (image), 14” x 11” (frame), Edition of 3
2024

GAYE JACKSON
Untitled with Poem from Artifact and Memory
Digital C-print
12" x 8"
2024

GAYE JACKSON
Untitled from Artifact and Memory
Digital C-print
12" x 12"
2024

MICHAEL DEWDNEY
Portals of Parallax
Archival Pigment Prints
9.5” x 4.5” ea
2024

RICK/SIMON
Bayview Ice
33"x 64" on front wall at 6 Lakeshore Ave

RICK/SIMON
Algonquin Ice, Iced Over series
16" x 20" framed on outside wall 2nd St

RICK/SIMON
Big Ice, Iced Over series
16" x 20" framed on outside wall 2nd St

RICK/SIMON
Docks Ice, Iced Over series
16" x 20" framed on outside wall 2nd St

RICK/SIMON
Whole Ice, Iced Over series
16" x 20" framed on outside wall 2nd St

ARTISTS

Anthea Baxter-Page

Anthea Baxter-Page is a contemporary photo-based artist and curator from Toronto, Canada with an exhibition history spanning nearly 20 years. Series work includes architecture, portraiture and still life from India as well as analogue film shot on Holga here at home. Recurrent themes of consumption and cultural impact are revisited with particular interest in the human imprint on historical settings, cultural artifacts and the mundane objects that occupy our time and space.

Website: antheabaxterpage.com
Instagram: @antheabaxterpageart

Always looking for something new created from deterioration, Anthea Baxter-Page explores growth from decay, beauty from the discarded, rejuvenation from the fatigued. From the series, THINGS WE LEFT BEHIND, ABP revels in rust and etchings, imprints and debris as both signifiers of our footprint and the possibility of new life ahead. There will forever be beauty in the once glorious.

Claudette Abrams

Claudette Abrams is a Canadian, Toronto-based multimedia artist, curator and art educator. Her work employs photography, video, projection, holography, fabricated material construction, site-specific and immersive installation.

Website: claudetteabrams.ca
Instagram: @claudetteabrams

EQUIVOCALENCE is a series of paired images, marking tipping points in scales of consequence large and small. Human-made and naturally generated/degenerated, dynamic forces and processes, mediate alongside each other, and in synchronicity, to mixed effect over the progressions of time and place.

Eliza Moore

Eliza Moore is a self-taught documentary and art photographer based in Toronto. Her other work in urban design, architecture and project management creates the context for careful observation and documentation of development and conservation in the city, the infrastructure behind it, and other topical issues. Many of her works are set in the Toronto waterfront and other parts of the Great Lakes. Moore’s work has been shown in numerous group shows in Toronto and Montreal, and at Gallery 44 and the Rectory Gallery on Toronto Island.

A cancer diagnosis and the resulting treatments last year was a stark reminder of how fragile and painful life can be. In Contact 2024, Moore will be showing a new series that likens the pain of recovery to the prickly thorns of the cactus.

Website: eccentricmontage.com
Instagram: @mooreeliza

PRICKLY PAIN STUDY

As one ages, body components and whole systems degenerate. Joints seize up, aches and pains abound, bits and pieces sicken and wither. The ultimate indignity of having a body part removed is overshadowed by constant prickliness, both physical and mental.

Gaye Jackson

Gaye Jackson is a Toronto-based artist whose practice explores environmental history, geology, and land use. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally including Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto; A Space, Toronto; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto; OR Gallery, Vancouver; Silver Eye, Pittsburg. Jackson’s recent work investigates the changing shoreline of Lake Ontario.

Website: www.gayejackson.com
Instagram: @jacksongaye8

ARTIFACT AND MEMORY includes images of fragments of electrical wire found at Leslie Spit. The Spit is a peninsula into Lake Ontario created from construction debris from demolition of Toronto buildings circa 1960 to 1990. It’s a place of ruins linked to the city’s political and social history embedded in the rubble. The wire fragments are artifacts from that time, their surface weathering a chronicle of time and change.

Rick/Simon

My home since 1968 has been an island house originally built in 1932 and named EDEN. From there I have traveled to work at the Coach House Press, many Shadowland and VideoCabaret venues and other locations including Trinidad, Tibet, Mali & Banff to photograph and sometimes dance on stilts.

Website: www.torontoislandart.org/artists-k-w/ricksimon
Instagram: @richardsimpley

ICED OVER

Always returning to Ward’s Island to enjoy the changing seasons especially the one we formerly called Winter. Conditions of temperature and wind could generate ice sculptures that would only exist until warmer weather degenerated them back to water. Catching those fleeting moments on film and digitally was important.

Michael Dewdney

Emerging Canadian photographer Michael Dewdney has centred his practice in and around the Toronto Islands where he was raised.

Instagram: @islandewd

PORTALS OF PARALLAX

Forests, both natural or in the urban environment, are places of constant generation/(de)generation. Leaves that fall in autumn provide nutrients to plants and animals through winter, allowing for a spring rebirth.

Human-made objects follow a similar cycle of generation/(de)generation. In the concrete wall in these images, small pebbles (broken down from larger rocks and worn smooth in rivers and lakes) help to fortify the earth-extracted ingredients that provide strength to the whole.

These too will (de)generate over time, their various parts returned to the earth from whence they came.

Currently On View:

CLAUDETTE ABRAMS

Claudette Abrams - 22 Bayview Ave

ELIZA MOORE

Anthea Baxter-Page - 14 Channel Ave

RICK/SIMON

Rick/Simon - 6 Lakeshore Ave front and Second St side

GAYE JACKSON

Gaye Jackson - 26 Lakeshore Ave

ANTHEA BAXTER-PAGE

Eliza Moore - 11 Fifth St

RICK/SIMON

Rick/Simon - 6 Lakeshore Ave front and Second St side

RICK/SIMON

Rick/Simon - 6 Lakeshore Ave front and Second St side

MICHAEL DEWDNEY

Michael Dewdney - 28 Lakeshore Ave