Driveway Dance-Off, Jul 22 – Aug 26, 2016

CANADA is pleased to announce Stuart Lorimer and Emily Davidson's two person exhibition Driveway Dance-Off, opening July 22nd, 2016. When you hear Driveway Dance-Off, you may think of happy friends in checked shirts, tied at the waist on the girls, doing the loopty loo in some suburban lane. Vintage station wagons and verdant pastures stretching into the distance.

Ms. Davidson and Mr. Lorimer are engaged with the depiction of fields of dreams, overlaid images that come together and apart in ways both exaggerated and precise. Davidson’s paintings translate scenes of nature that recollect broader America, the land that exists between Chicago and Nevada City. Rather than recreating a landscape outright, she offers a vision through a drinking glass, a series of mirrors, or pools of water. Like smoke coming off a lake on a cool morning, Davidson’s paintings possess liquidity, convey mirage. Logos and symbols are filled with painterly strokes and color, a washing machine, a geode, the twisted figure of a marbleized mannequin. Each work contains a loose list of objects which are an analog for perception, memories and dreams.

Lorimer employs space in his paintings as if it were an unusual event. The characters he depicts are often solemn, exploring their empty rooms like astronauts floating in outer space. The color of their surroundings reads like the palette prescribed to an architect in a city bi-law. Lorimer makes paintings that contain all the complexities of a monopoly game, and yet they are somehow elusively simple. Like his friend and partner, Davidson, he is consumed with mirrors that lead to other passageways in the mind, and stories which reflect other stories and history.

Lorimer and Davidson met as students in the Tyler School of Art’s MFA program. As fate would have it, they shared a studio and then many confidences. Together they run a gallery in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, called Bannerette, where they curate exhibitions of emerging artists from New York and abroad. Join us in celebrating their work.

Emily Davidson was born in 1987 in Indianapolis, IN. She completed her BFA in painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (2009) and studied at the Kunste Akademie in Munich, Germany. She earned an MFA in painting at Tyler School of Art in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Orgy Park (Brooklyn), Vox Populi, FJORD, Crane Arts, the Woodmere Museum of Art (all Philadelphia); and the University Gallery at Richard Stockton College (Galloway, NJ).

Stuart Lorimer was born in 1985 in Glasgow, Scotland. He completed his BA (Hons.) First Class in Painting from the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland (2008). He earned an MFA in painting at Tyler School of Art in 2011. In 2015, Lorimer presented a solo exhibition at Lyles & King, New York. He's exhibited with CANADA at Frieze Art Fair, London, NADA, Miami, and in Anthropocene (2014). Lorimer is the recipient of the 2009 Stevenston Award for Painting, granted by The Royal Scottish Academy.

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