Along the Way
November 16th to December 17th
Olga Abeleva, David Bellemare, Caroline Douville, Nadya Isabella, Philip Leonard Ocampo, Katayoon Yousefbigloo.
To celebrate the first year of TAP Art Space as a commercial gallery, we would like to invite you to Along the Way a group show featuring Olga Abeleva (QC), David Bellemare (QC), Caroline Douville (QC), Nadya Isabella (QC), Philip Leonard Ocampo (ON), and Katayoon Yousefbigloo (BC).
Since its beginning, TAP has been a nomadic, chameleonic project: From “TAP 1”, the very first 2-day pop-up show that ignited it all, to its first and second locations in garages in Montréal and Toronto - respectively - and now to its current home, a space located in the St. Michel neighbourhood in Montréal, where TAP has operated as a commercial gallery since November of last year.
Through all these motions, adaptations, and changes, we are privileged and grateful to have gathered a collective of friends and collaborators to share this ride with. For this festive occasion, we have curated a selection of works that deal with the concept of trajectory. Whether temporal, spatial, or historical, these pieces embrace change, mutation, and motion.
Along the Way is part of Pictura 2023.
To obtain more information please kindly reach out to contact@tapartspace.com
About the artists:
Olga Abeleva is a Russian-born visual artist, writer and costume designer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Her practice alternates between painting, performance and costume-making. She draws from folkloric narratives, Eastern European superstition, symbolism, coincidence, magic, and soap operas to build immersive worlds with recurring characters.
David Bellemare is a Montreal-based artist and MFA candidate at Concordia University. David’s practice is rooted in collage: he considers the mediums of painting and sculpture as a process of copy/paste. Bellemare takes images out of their original context and juxtaposes them with others to assign them new meanings. Mainly, he draws his inspiration from the web, used books, sacred rites and the popular culture that was prevalent during his childhood. The discrepancy between these created universes helps him to create a sense of discomfort that activates the pictorial surface; from kitsch to grandiose, from the banal to the sacred.
Caroline Douville is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University. Caroline’s imagery is an amalgam of different ways of thinking and received ideas, circulated by word-of-mouth between different ethnic groups. She draws these images from elements of local popular culture that are disseminated on the Internet. Douville is interested in the way we look at foreign cultures and in the construction of a vision of them in the collective imagination.
Nadya Isabella, is an artist born in Jakarta, Indonesia and is currently living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang territories. An Emily Carr graduate, Isabella’s painting practice spans a wide range of themes, from animals to pop culture, the fetishization of commodities to the rituals of the everyday.
Philip Leonard Ocampo is an artist and arts facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Ocampo’s multidisciplinary practice involves painting, sculpture, writing and curatorial projects. Exploring worldbuilding, radical hope and speculative futures, Ocampo’s work embodies a curious cross between magic wonder and the nostalgic imaginary. Following the tangents, histories and canons of popular culture, Ocampo is interested in how unearthing cultural zeitgeists of past / current times may therefore serve as catalysts for broader conversations about lived experiences; personal, collective, diasporic, etc.
Katayoon Yousefbigloo is an interdisciplinary artist and musician working with degraded media to reverse-engineer cultural narratives and mythologies. Her work often takes shape in media installation and performance but leaves an ephemera of text, music, and merchandise. She holds an MFA from the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
For further information or press inquiries, please reach out to contact@tapartspace.com
