The Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to announce Boarding Pass , a group show of paintings and photographs. The exhibition is about taking flight on worldly journeys, reconnaissance missions and spiritual trips. The images reflect the travel process which means waiting around, packing up, shipping out, clearing customs, dropping anchor, affairs abroad, aerial views, sightseeing, shopping and places of worship.

15 March - 13 April, 2003

Jack Burman 's photographs of a temple in India and a church in Mexico indicate a sense of pilgrimage and devotional attention. Both works also foreground the contrast between these exalted, timeless spaces and the frenetic bustle that must be navigated to get to them. Roy Arden 's Smoking Area documents a neglected aspect of the transport hub, the absolute non-place of the smoke break. Like an updated scene from the Ashcan School of painters, Smoking Area is where passengers kill time while the wings are de-iced. Howard Ursuliak 's Three Suitcases, meanwhile, shows the worn containers of another person's travel, now up for sale, memories and all, in a thrift store. In his large panel made of oil and wax Derek Root offers a cloudscape that suggests freedom from all earthly bonds as much as it does imminent turbulence and air sickness bags. Stephen Waddell 's Planespotter is a contemporary vision of the urban pastoral, bisected as it is by a chain link fence, a grounded plane and an unidentified figure holding an electronic device. A U2 spyplane moving through an ink-black sky in a painting by William MacDonnell is the dark version of "seeing the world". Below this the New Sukarev Market in Moscow (1924) unfolds in a Constructivist flurry of diagonals in Anna Hunt 's embroidered work, Market. Ron Hunt writes (apropos of Boarding Pass), "Today the market's connotations - via holiday and cookery programmes - are authenticity and escapism; the indigenous and the exotic; a haunt for the flaneur as well as the bargain hunter." Finally, with Untitled (Ship Tiles) Graham Gillmore presents nine clipper ships whose sails are all emblazoned with female names, implicating the port of call as an erotic exchange, the faraway affair, the siren's song and the lure of the sea.

The exhibition is curated by Clint Roenisch and dedicated to the late Colin de Land (1955-2003).

Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00am to 6:00pm
E-mail: info@monteclarkgallery.com
Website: www.monteclarkgallery.com