Group Exhibition – The Empty Church Press Release

The Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to present our upcoming group exhibition, “The Empty Church.”

A pair of dogs fight, a woman dies over and over, a lover lies still in bed.

“The Empty Church” is a meditation on the loss of life, presenting and juxtaposing vastly different, often traumatic yet nuanced, depictions of death. From spectacles of violence to intimate reflections on mortality, the artworks on display convey grief, discomfort, and anxiety. The gallery’s blank walls, and the sanctity of the white cube, set the stage for the gnashing of teeth and inescapable loss of life. The viewer is enraptured in somebody’s losing battle -witnessing their loss, losing by their side.

“The Empty Church” will feature paintings, photography, and sculptural work by gallery artists such as Rae Johnson, Janieta Eyre, Sherri Hay, and Gordon Rayner. It will also premiere paintings by Toronto-based artists Shinae Kim and Jobelle Quijano.

The exhibition is divided into two thematic sections. The South Gallery features sensational outbursts of violence, while the North Gallery hosts perturbingly still and subtle contemplations of loss. The contrasting subject matter and jarring combination of moods will leave the viewer in a state of ambivalence, unsure of how to react to any one tragedy but forced to experience them all.

For instance, the crushing black and white crowds of Sherri Hay’s charcoal drawings (detail: left) suffocate the viewer amidst bloodthirsty games and performances, while Janieta Eyre’s series of Rehearsals (detail: right) casts the audience as voyeurs caught silently witnessing varying iterations of the artist’s death.

The blood-spattered altar of Gordon Rayner’s The Empty Church (detail: left), the exhibition’s titular piece, was painted in anxious anticipation of an explosive dog fight, based on the artist’s observations of wild dogs occupying old church courtyards of Oaxaca. Conversely, the weeping figures of Shinae Kim’s war-torn tableaus (detail: right) reference battles past, drawing upon histories and mythologies of conflict and violence.

And while both Daisuke Takeya and Rae Johnson created pieces in response to contemporary tragedies and the loss of a child’s life, there’s a stark contrast between Takeya’s daylight landscape and Johnson’s sublime vortex of colour. Takeya commemorates the loss of over 80 lives in the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami with a beautiful, tranquil depiction of the Ishinomaki Okawa Elementary School (detail: left). Johnson’s Death of the Child (detail: right) was painted after the artist heard the news of “yet another rape and murder of a little girl in Toronto,” depicting the harrowing scene with monstrous forms taking over the child.

“The Empty Church” asks viewers to confront conflicting depictions of loss. Whether through a slow march towards the death of a relationship or in an overwhelming entanglement of struggling bodies, something resonates – perhaps a reckoning with our own mortality or simply compassion for the lives lost in our presence. In an age that forces us to not only become desensitized to violence but to live in anticipation of it, these works invoke reaction and reflection, not due to shock value but through an understated, persisting sense of humanity. Viewers may find solace in the same lurid compositions that prompt their distress.