Kardosh Projects, in association with the Marion Scott Gallery, is pleased to announce Mono / chrome, a group exhibition by some of Canada’s most distinguished artists. On view from June 19 until August 9, the show brings together drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, and sculpture from the 1960s to the present, with styles ranging from hard edge to the gestural, and from abstraction to high realism. A preview and opening reception will take place in the gallery Wednesday, June 18, from 7-9 pm.

The monochromatic image derives its power and its place in avant-garde visual practice from the liberatory potential of restricting the palette to the exploration of a single color, whether this is black and white (Malevich, Ad Reinhard), gray (Jasper Johns), white (Agnes Martin), or electric blue (Yves Klein). Mono/chrome, the first in a planned series of three exhibitions on the potential of monochromatism, as well as its thresholds, includes work in black and white by ten Canadian artists. These artists have limited one parameter of their practice to allow other elements to become more intensely visible, as, for example, the geometries of composition in hard edge work or the specificity of medium in gestural abstraction. Mono / chrome attends in ways dictated first and foremost by the artists’ own practice to the play of design against medium, as this is amplified through a delimitation that has the further effect, of course, of making pure colour more visible, too, as an actor on the field.

Mandy Boursicot (b. 1959, Hong Kong) is an internationally known artist and a leader in the Classical Realism movement. Her virtuoso drawings and paintings, grounded in a study of the techniques and styles of the Italian Renaissance, include portraiture and still lifes. A recent series of drawings in graphite depicting antique European tools worn through use pays tribute to the ideals of technical skill and longstanding traditions of manual labour. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Yves Gaucher (b.1934, Montreal, d.2000, Montreal) is a central figure in Canadian art of the second half of the twentieth century. He rose to international prominence with his Grey on Grey canvases of 1968, an ensemble of abstract paintings that disrupted the picture plane by placing patterns of grey lines against grey backgrounds. Subsequently, his abstraction used bands of colour in horizontal and diagonal series to effect a play between chromatic discord and repose. Across his career, Gaucher also worked extensively as a printmaker. His work was the subject of a major 2004 retrospective at the Musée d’art Contemporarain de Montréal.

Sophie Jodoin (b. 1965, Montreal) is an internationally recognized artist working at the threshold between a representational and conceptual practice. Her meticulously rendered drawings of bodies and objects deliberately blur the distinctions among drawing, collage and photography. In that way, they disquietingly use expectations about medium to explore issues around human intimacy and human contact. Among her recent shows is a 2012 solo exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery. She lives and works in Montreal.

Attila Richard Lukacs (b. 1962, Alberta) is recognized as one of the most significant Canadian painters of his generation. Best known for his monumental canvases of Germany’s skinhead culture around the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lukacs has most recently shifted his practice to abstraction in a range of media including oil, photography and collage. His work was the subject of a major 2011 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He currently resides in Vancouver.

Vicky Marshall (b.1952 Sheffield, England, imm. Vancouver, Canada, 1966) first came to national prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of large urban scenes painted in a neo-Expressionist style associated with the Kitchen Sink School in London. Subsequently, her painting and drawing have focused on landscape and still life, executed in a bold gestural style attentive to scale and surface. Her most recent show, in 2013, was Nests and Trees at The Reach Gallery (Abbotsford). She lives and works near Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast.

Michael Morris (b. 1942, Saltdean, England, imm. Victoria, Canada 1946) is widely recognized as a central figure in Canadian art of the later twentieth century. He first came to national prominence in the 1960s as a leading member of Vancouver’s burgeoning avant-garde. Strongly influenced by Fluxus and Pop Art, Morris has gone on to develop a wide-ranging conceptual practice that encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, mail art, installation and archival production. In 2011, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and in 2012 his work was featured in a major exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Morris lives and works in Vancouver and Victoria.

Parr (b. 1893 near Cape Dorset, d. 1969, Cape Dorset) is acknowledged as one of the most important Canadian Inuit artists of the 20^th century. In a career that lasted only eight years, Parr created a seminal body of graphic work that drew chiefly on his memories of the semi-nomadic life he led through 1969, when he moved from his camp into Cape Dorset. Parr’s drawings and prints of hunting and animal life generally are notable chiefly for their directness and economy of expression and for their evocatively elongated forms. Parr’s work was the subject of a 2011 two-person exhibition (with Luke Anguhadluq) at the Carleton University Art Gallery.

Ed Pien (b. 1958 Tapei, Taiwan, imm. Canada 1969) is an internationally recognized multi-media and installation artist, probably best known for installations that use light projections, video, translucent paper, cut-outs, and silhouettes to pull the viewer quite literally into the space of his drawing. His subject is the space in which dwelling occurs, and he moves easily between representations of human figures caught between the claims of play and violence and a wide range of mythical beings that in their other-worldliness inhabit and haunt the this-world. Widely exhibited in commercial and institutional spaces, his work was profiled at the 2012 Sydney Bienniale. He lives and works in Toronto.

Jutai Toonoo (b. 1959, Cape Dorset, Nunavut) is a dynamic voice in contemporary Inuit art and in Canadian art more generally. He first came to prominence in the early 2000s with a series of bold sculptures of human heads, rendered as though in an agitated sleep. His practice has developed since then to include drawing and printmaking in various media and often incorporating wry and politically subversive text. In addition to large format portraits, Toonoo has also been making landscapes and still lifes. His work will be featured in a major solo exhibition at the Marion Scott Gallery in September 2014. He lives in Cape Dorset.

Claude Tousignant (b.1932, Montreal) is a leading exponent of non-objective painting and an important contributor to the development of geometric abstraction in Canada. He became internationally known in the mid 1960s for his iconic paintings of concentric circles in bright alternating colours. In all his work, Tousignant rigorously excludes reference and association as sources of meaning for the paint surface. In 2009, Tousignant was given a major retrospective at the Musée d’art Contemporarain de Montréal, and in 2010 he was named a winner of the Governor General’s Award in Visual Art. He lives and works in Montreal.