gallery arcturus

Gallery Arcturus is a not-for-profit contemporary art exhibition and art education centre located in downtown Toronto. It is funded and operated by The Foundation for the Study of Objective Art, a private charity.

The gallery is an oasis of peace in the midst of a busy city. The space has been carefully designed to provide an opportunity for uninterrupted contemplation of visual art without the pressures of commercial galleries and without the admission charges typical of other public galleries. Light, colour and proportion have been used to create an atmosphere suitable for accessing subtle impressions and insights which are usually obscured by the impact of the urban landscape.

The gallery also provides an outstanding opportunity for contemporary visual artists to display their work without the pressures of commercial considerations. The gallery seeks to exhibit works which engage the viewer’s sensations and feelings in a movement toward self-transcendence. The gallery has a view about what art is for: that art is for exploring the larger context of what it means to be human.

whale Whale, deborah harris

The Foundation for the Study of Objective Art

The Foundation is a private Canadian non-profit corporation established to promote the study of art. Most of our services are provided free of charge to the general public and art educators. Capital and operating requirements are met from charitable contributions which are tax deductible. The Foundation is governed by an independent Board of Directors.

Foundation Programs

The foundation is presently committed to five major programs:

  1. Acquiring and maintaining a permanent collection of visual art by contemporary North American artists;
  2. Operating Gallery Arcturus for exhibitions of the permanent collection and other works by contemporary North American artists;
  3. Publishing books of the permanent collection and livres d’artistes;
  4. Providing a center for artists, art educators, curators, critics and collectors to study objective art and artists;
  5. Reaching out to the arts community by providing workshops, discussion forums, and access to images from its permanent collection.
Affiliations

The Foundation and Gallery Arcturus are members of the following organizations:

  • Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG)
  • Visual Arts Ontario (VAO)
  • Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
Night Field NightField, deborah harris
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What is Objective Art?

Kelly Rivera We Just Love Here We Just Love Here, Kelly Rivera

In the philosophical sense, objective implies a world outside of ourselves,a world with its own inherent qualities which we can come to know. As the Oxford Dictionary defines it, objective is "the object of perception or thought, as distinct from the perceiving or thinking subject...the character of being...external to the mind."

Subjective is "relating to the thinking subject... having its source in the mind". The ultimate subjective view is that all experience is a product of the mind and that, if anything exists outside the mind, it is unknowable as such.

Neither point of view can be defended in an absolute sense. Clearly, an objective universe can only be known through the perceptual apparatus and this fact takes us toward the subjective. But it also seems possible to experience the world more objectively by dealing with the raw data of experience as it presents itself in physical sensations, emotions and insights without the subjective elements of personal history.

Does this distinction matter to art? Probably, although again, not in any absolute, philosophical sense. Two quite different directions are available to the artist. I can explore my personal history and how it shapes and affects me and my experience. This is subjective art and it reflects my psychological conditioning. Or I can seek fresh experience without this conditioning by attempting to set aside the personal elements of past experience.

The same choice confronts the viewer. Viewing art with reference to personal associations is subjective. Setting these associations aside in favor of the impressions inherent in the work of art itself is to move towards the objective.

These questions of objectivity have become all the more important with the evolution of abstract art in the 20th century. Critics and viewers have challenged abstract artists as to whether their art has a subject outside of themselves (and is therefore objective or "real"). The response of artists such as Arshile Gorky was that he was not among "those who invent things instead of translating them". Even an art devoid of recognizable forms can use shape, color and texture objectively, given that these qualities have observable aesthetic effects in and of themselves, without any other meaning or context.

EJ Gold Face of War

Face of War, EJ Gold

For many members of the New York School, moving towards the abstract was to move away from the subjective. "Art is not expression..." said Mark Rothko..." for an artist, the problem is to talk about, and to, something outside yourself". He sought "to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment". Barnett Newman said of this effort that "we are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia...."

Nonetheless, it is an article of faith of the late 20th century that all art is subjective. But if this is so, the implications are immense: the subjective solitudes of artist and viewer never meet. Art's entry into the viewer's world is entirely private and unknowable; its issuance from the artist's world either a random, unexplainable mystery or an event to be trivialized by psychological interpretation.

Objective art is an attempt at communication between artist and viewer, a communion of experience based, as it must be, on shared time and space.It is an attempt to be together despite the subjectivities of our separate and unique psychic identities.

Objective art, if it is possible, is an agreement between artist and viewer to share a state of being through the medium of a work of art.

In part, art becomes objective because the artist seeks to penetrate an experience and encode its emotions, sensations and ideas in line and tone.

EJ Gold MountainPass Arcturus

Mountain Pass Arcturus, EJ Gold

Although the experience may have its roots in the artist's past, it is objectified by reducing it to its essentials of feeling and sensation, recreating it in the present to make it more accessible and more effective. And in part, art becomes objective because the viewer makes it so, by consciously suspending subjectivity and entering into the work, there by decoding it and, in a sense, completing it. Objective art is art viewed objectively, which is to say in the present, without personal associations. To move towards the objective is to move from the personal to the impersonal, from the unique to the universal, from the past to the present.

Objective art is thus a path of transformation because it is a means for learning and for expanding vocabularies of feeling and sensation. Transformation -- changing form -- means to change my time for present time, the only time when something new can occur, and to change my space for the space inhabited by the artist. As Rothko noted, "the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." This is what objective art intends. Artists need not know intellectually the aim or meaning of the experiences conveyed by their art. It is enough that the artist be able to attend to the experience, clarify it and capture some of its effects. Nor does the viewer need to understand the experience; it is enough to receive it.

Implicit in the effort is the idea that art is an adventure, a journey into the unknown with the artist as guide.

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not

T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

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