Biographies

Stephanie Boyd was born and raised in south California. As a dancer and musician, she became involved in politically committed performance art at the University of California's San Diego campus. She later travelled around the United States and performed rallies and on street corners. Boyd returned to California and attended UCSC where she gained a solid understanding of art history and philosophy. She travelled through Europe visiting the major museums, painting in Spain and becoming involved in some performance art in Amsterdam. Returning to the United States she joined the School of Reductionism and continues to work in many mediums, music being an integral part of her work.

Roger Chow lives and works in Toronto. He often paints when others are sleeping and in this way paints often. He has been engaged for some time in an ongoing dialogue with deborah and the gallery space. This conversation has inspired artist workshops and follow-up shows of the work that emerges from them. Roger generously contributes his work and insight to the inquiry that the gallery creates space for.

Chris Dolan was born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. After her studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Corcoran College of Art in Washington she moved to France where she continued studying at Les Beaux Arts in Grenoble and finished at Les Beaux Arts de aix-en-Provence. She has lived and exhibited her work in France for the past twenty years. She has just recently returned to the United States and it is from there that she brings her work to Toronto.

E.J. Gold is a master artist. His proficiency extends into many artistic media, including painting and sculpting as well as professional video and music recording, computer game writing, and virtual reality wizardry. Gold has created a diversified and monumental oeuvre in the course of the forty years of his career as an artist. All his work speaks of breathtaking vision, technical expertise, uncompromising discipline, and engaging humor.

E.J. Gold was born in New York City in 1941. As the son of H.L. Gold, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, he grew up surrounded by artists and intellectuals, the Who’s Who in the Arts in America of the 40's and 50's: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Pete Seeger...

The New York School, Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Rico Lebrun and Fritz Schwaderer are among his early influences. A member of the infamous California Nine, a guerilla artist group of the sixties, he was widely recognized for his invention of soft and breathing sculptures.

Gold is a perceptual scientist who uses art as his primary investigative tool. He is the principal author of the Manifesto on Reductionism published jointly with the Grass Valley Graphics Group, an artistic enclave at the cutting edge of experimentation in objective art where visual elaboration is reduced to a minimum. In keeping with the tenets of reductionism, instead of drawing on personal elements of past experience, the artist directs his attention to the world of stillness and silence that lies just on the other side of the veil.

Gold's work often violates scale, at once denying dimension and perspective. By making use of color, form, texture, negative space, forced perspective, compressions, color field and figure-ground relationships, Gold depicts the world beyond the boundaries of space and time, portraying timeless eternity.

Some of Gold's more well-known series of paintings include the Faces of War, PlanarContiguities, Odalisques, Guides, Moonbeam, White House Series, Expressionist Landscapes, Sanitarium Series, Angels, Monumentals, Haunted Corridors, and City in the Sky.

These powerful paintings by this remarkable shamanic artist are gateways to sublime mystical experiences. They are profoundly experiential and impenetrable by the mind but have the ability to awaken higher centers. Therein lies their key.

deborah harris serves as artist-in-residence at Gallery Arcturus. It is a title given to her by the gallery which simply means that her artistic inquiry happens and is made accessible within this space. Her work involves inviting other artists to participate in an inquiry and or finding specific examples of artists' work which can be shown in the gallery. She also conducts collage workshops at the gallery for public attendance and is available to meet and work with individuals.

Andrea Maguire was born in Toronto in 1955, and she still makes her home in the city. A widely exhibited artist, her studies in mythology, psychology and meditation help her to explore the human psyche and create new ways of expression in this world of perpetual change.

With degrees from the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, Maguire has worked as a teacher (art and history) and as an illustrator. She has exhibited in prestigious group shows since 1975, and more recently has presented her mixed media images in solo exhibitions in Toronto. Two resoundingly successful group shows in New York earlier this year led to a place at the Monserrat Gallery in Soho.

Maguire's reflective and meditative approach to her art is particularly in harmony with the spirituality of the ancient culture and sacred traditions that are still a vital part of Tibet today. Deeply moved by her recent visit, her beautiful abstract images with their interplay of texture, colour and collage, evoke the poignant sensations and the raw ancient energy she found imbued in the long forbidden land.

Kelly Rivera was born in Puerto Rico, she studied art and theatre at the University of Maryland and then move to New York City where she worked professionally in both mediums. Rivera considers Rico Lebrun, Tom Johnson and E.J. Gold as having had the greatest influence on her work. She also has been inspired by tantric art in its use of colour and stylization. In her most recent works, we can see references to the symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite imagery of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She uses art as a "means to access a world that is usually unseen". Many of Rivera's works are influenced by her vivid dreams, past and present. She has been a member of the School of Reductionism for 12 years.

Adrian Symonds is a sculptor of wood presently living in British Columbia. His human figures hold a gesture, a posture with an inner attention we are drawn to enter. The forms that emerge from his hands possess strength and solidity balanced in movement. We at the gallery find many opportunities to incorporate these pieces into our shows.