Dyan Marie and Bill Marshall: Disrupted Pictures

Looking at Dyan Marie's photographs and Bill Marshall's oil-painted landscapes separately would make you question what, if anything, they have in common---Marie's still-life shots of urban Toronto life, altered in photoshop to create streaks of elongated colour seem more than a province away from Marshall's almost artificially coloured south shore landscape paintings, with an overlaid pattern of paint transfer from a sheet of bubble wrap rolled onto the canvas. Curator Peter Dykhuis, who says Marie and Marshall didn't meet until the show's opening two weeks ago, calls both art forms "unexpected inversions"---Marshall paints the "Doers and Dreamers" tourist landscape bleakly, choosing to paint contested territories in his neighbourhood that are slotted for development, while Marie makes a grey-looking Toronto neighbourhood much more vibrant with a focus on flowers and community members. Marshall's bubble wrap effect---with deliberately popped holes to create paint transfer patterns---gives his natural landscape a digital feel, like residue from a computer screen. Marie's work is actually entirely digital---digital camera, digital alterations and the ability to continuously change it in a digital world. Walk your own way through the analogous and the digital until May 9 at the gallery. With a talk by Bill Marshall Sun Apr 11 at 2pm. –Holly Gordon