Patrick Mahon’s newest resin paintings on acrylic are based on drawings of snow banks he produced in Baker Lake, Nunavut, in the spring of 2005. Mahon was working on a project in the Inuit community when he observed snow moving machines pushing up sometimes spectacular "snow mountains" on nearly a daily basis.  Even in a remote northern outpost the activity of temporarily reforming the winter landscape was a constant labour and a social preoccupation.  For Mahon, the "small mountains" he encountered in Baker Lake became an apt symbol for a relationship to nature marked by a desire to control it in the face of change and uncertainty, while being emblematic of the necessity to retain and protect polar ice from global warming.

For Canadians, both artistic and commercial representations of nature and the landscape have long contributed to a collective sense of place and of national and individual identity.  Thus, in painting and on printed matter as diverse as money, postcards and souvenir stamps, majestic representations of mountains, lakes and forests have been seen for decades.  Patrick Mahon’s Small Mountains Series, though linked to this tradition, has less grandiose aspirations.  The highly coloured and patently artificial glass-like pieces recall souvenirs, while playing on the desire for fantastic and illusionistic reminders of the spaces often lost to us in everyday life.  The slightly humorous tone of the small candy-like snow piles offers a version of "nature" with which we are only too familiar, but Mahon renders them poetic, at times beautiful, while reminding us of the north’s environmental vulnerability.

Smash the Bourgeoisie! Victory to the Decorating Business! follows David Mabb’s 2004 exhibition at Leo Kamen Gallery, Useless Work Versus Useless Toil.

David Mabb is based in London and has been working with the fabric and wallpaper designs of William Morris (1834-1896) for the past eight years. By simplifying and recontextualizing Morris's designs Mabb questions the patterns' Utopian idealism. His on-going 'collaboration' with William Morris has taken many forms and his work has been shown widely in Canada, Britain and India. He has recently shown at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. He was also the curator/artist responsible for the exhibition William Morris: Ministering to the Swinish Luxury of the Rich, at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK in 2004. In this show he brought together original Morris material, contemporary appropriations of Morris patterns, and his own art works.

Mabb is interested in Morris as a historical figure as much as he is fascinated by Morris’s design legacy. Morris was famous for his romantic poetry and utopian novels; he was responsible for founding England’s first architectural conservation society, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In English political life he was known as the treasurer of the National Liberal League, a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1883 he founded the Socialist League. He also ran his interior design business and factory Morris & Co.. Morris thought design had a role to play in the quality of everyday life, a belief epitomized in his renowned tenet: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

In Smash the Bourgeoisie! Victory to the Decorating Business! Mabb has produced a series of 18 small square paintings in which textile designs by three Russian artists from the 1920s, Varvara Stepanova, Luibov Popova and Kazimir Malevich, are painted onto squares of different William Morris wallpapers in colours commercially produced to replicate those used in Morris’s original designs. They create what Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project calls a dialectical image: that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.