Julia Dault
'Blame It On the Rain'
May 1 to June 28

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Toronto-born, New York–based artist Julia Dault. Through a selection of new and recent works, the exhibition reveals the importance to Dault of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault’s textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in Blame It On the Rain.

Dault is interested in ‘embodied knowledge’ — how making is thinking — and reinserts the artist’s hand into a minimal aesthetic primarily interpreted as distanced and industrial. The artist’s rule-based painting involves responding to mass-produced elements — patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint straight from the tube — with unconventional tools, such as squeegees, rubber combs and sea sponges. The limitations of these objects create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture.

The exhibition complements 'Color Me Badd', presented at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2014. The two institutions are working together on the first major monograph of Dault’s work, to be published by Black Dog Publishing later in 2015.