Artists: Sandra Bermudez, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Karen Marston, PRAXIS, Orlin Mantchev, Pierre St-Jacques, Auriane Sokoloski

With performances by PRAXIS & Auriane Sokoloski at the opening. Other performances to be announced at the opening.

Reconstruction explores the many subtleties and shapes of survival and transformation using all manner of media, from painting to video and performance. The nightly news is a litany of destruction. The wreckage surrounds us—towers fall, waves crash, the world is at war and love is hard to find. But reconstruction and renewal spring eternal even from our contaminated contemporary soil. The stamina of desire and vitality asserts itself anew in the work of these eight artists.

Sandra Bermudez hints at the vagaries of marriage and childhood depictions of commitment with the lush-lashed, dewy eyed “Little Birds” a top towers of white pillows. Stephanie Brody-Lederman’s paintings are inspired by the contaminated but nurturing atmosphere in NYC after September 11th. Karen Marston’s paintings are dreamy, richly colored imaginings of hearts, lungs and bronchia breathing underwater or entwined with twisting tree branches, organs roosting in nests of veins and twigs. Beneath the surface of these painterly explorations of body and environment, metaphors unfold speaking of pain, loss and regeneration. Performance team Praxis constructed a Death Clock for the show which will be displayed continuously, changing daily on the window of chashama to bring awareness to the continuing loss of lives in Iraq. Orlin Mantchev’s abstract paintings are of the Newfoundland landspace and deal with how the people, culture and land has been overlooked and neglected but how in the end it has thrived through its own means and traditions. Pierre St-Jacques’s video “Clouds and Raindrops” is about the complex nature of human difference and the intricacy of perception and human interaction. Auriane Sokoloski’s performance work and photography deals with the female Gothic and the different manners in which women and men experience fear and longing.

Curated by Station Independent Projects.