PATRICK MIKHAIL MONTREAL PRESENTS “TASTE THIS SAD CREAM” AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY JAY ISAAC, SOJOURNER TRUTH PARSONS, AND BRAD PHILLIPS
TASTE THIS SAD CREAM
JAY ISAAC
SOJOURNER TRUTH PARSONS
BRAD PHILLIPS
MONTRÉAL
JUNE 3 TO JULY 18, 2015
ARTIST RECEPTION:
FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 2015
5:30 P.M. TO 9 P.M.
PATRICK MIKHAIL is pleased to present TASTE THIS SAD CREAM, an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto artists JAY ISAAC and BRAD PHILLIPS, and Los Angeles artist SOJOURNER TRUTH PARSONS. In this innovative and thoughtful grouping, all three artists presented are engaged in various notions of the personal through their painting.
With different degrees of humour and sincerity, Jay Isaac, Sojourner Truth Parsons, and Brad Phillips share a commonality that relates a self-conscious romanticism, at once being seductive in its formal attributes but potentially confrontational in its approach and aesthetics. Brad Phillips paints documents of his direct life that are intensely inward looking and portray an unsettling honesty and self deprecation. Sojourner Truth Parsons takes aspects of identity and self reflection as the basis for physical abstractions that play with painting’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Jay Isaac makes process-based abstractions that are assembled through equally sincere and ironic methods that ask where source material comes from, and how an ensemble of forces influence decision making.
Taking positions of exemption from the demands of academic readability, each of the artists maintain an intuitive approach, one that promotes the experiential over the understandable. In this way, the works act as anti-consumable, desiring that they be dealt with on their own terms. Subject becomes inseparable from process, and in the action of making, the works become themselves, representing a trueness of character that is essential. Self absorption is a tenet of artistic endeavor, unspoken and frowned upon. The work in Taste This Sad Cream chooses to acknowledge this taboo and humorously embrace it.
JAY ISAAC lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He has shown extensively in Canada, the United States, and internationally including exhibitions at the Power Plant, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Mercer Union, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; White Columns, CUE Art Foundation, Morgan Lehman in New York; Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, NC; Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna; Gallerie Krets, Malmo; Musee d’art Moderne, Bologna; CSA Space, LES Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; The Khyber, Halifax; Silver Flag Projects and Stewart Hall in Montreal; Acuna Hansen in Los Angeles; NADA 2010, Miami. In October 2015, Isaac will be part of Patrick Mikhail Gallery’s three-artist presentation at FEATURE Art Fair in Toronto. Isaac attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C., and the Cardiff Institute of Art and Design in Cardiff, Wales, U.K.
SOJOURNER TRUTH PARSONS is a Los Angeles-based painter who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, New York, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles. Critical discourses and reviews about her work have appeared in Canadian Art Online, ARTINFO, Hunter and Cook, and the National Post. She has been the recipient of a number of prestigious residencies including the Santa Fe Art Institute, Canada Council for the Arts International Residency; and the Ross Creek Center for the Arts, in Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia. She has a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
BRAD PHILLIPS is a contemporary Canadian painter and writer based in Toronto. He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Basel, Milan, and Copenhagen, and is the subject of various critical texts and interviews. Aesthetically, Phillips is noted for his photorealist style and often references his own photographs to compose his paintings. He is also known for his text-based works, many of which include literary references. His works can be found in the collections of the Glenbow Museum, Capital Group Companies, Schiff Art Projects Royal Bank of Canada, and Hauser & Wirth.