Exhibition Opening | Yechel Gagnon: River's Way

Newzones is thrilled to announce "River’s Way", a solo exhibition of new work by Canadian contemporary artist, Yechel Gagnon. Join us for the exhibition opening on Saturday, September 13th from 2-4pm and enjoy the exhibition on view through Saturday, October 11th.

For the past 30 years, Canadian artist Yechel Gagnon has created a distinctive visual language using plywood as an artistic material to create bas-reliefs.

"River’s way" speaks to the power and the enduring beauty of the natural world. The carved imagery transitions between abstraction and depiction, forming an elegant allegory in response to the artist’s natural surroundings viewed, lived and transposed through her creative process.

Evoking a connection between time and place, these fictional landscapes embrace multiple perspectives interweaving elements of nature to produce various transitions and viewpoints. The rhythms and implicit passages of time calls to mind either the cycles of seasons or of days.

This new series of works consists of plywood panels fashioned with coloured stained veneers that are hand-carved with various tools, obtaining a personal language of mark making that is both sculptural and painterly. Gagnon’s ability to create rich effects without using any paint highlights her mastery of wood carving as an artistic medium. The textures and nuances that she excavates from her panels create delicate transitions that subtly shift throughout the pieces. Working in symbiosis with the material at hand, she creates a distinctive visual language that reveals interconnectedness between art and our surrounding world.

It is now proven by neuroscience[1] that aesthetic experiences that derive from viewing art or being in contact with nature enhance our neuroplasticity and help our cognitive health. Gagnon, always being in sync with this general idea, offers us bas-reliefs that are aesthetically rich and constantly evolving according to the ambient lighting reverberating on their surfaces. In this matter, "River’s way" is a homage to the radiance and resilience of Nature as something both outside and within us.

[1] Magsamen, Susan and Ross, Ivy. Your Brain on Art, New York, Random House, 2023