Headlines @ Communication Art Gallery

Deep Breath

There are only a few days left to catch Annie Terrazzo’s, Headlines, at Harbord’s Communication Art Gallery.  The exhibition highlights just one facet of what Terrazzo herself has labeled, trash portraiture, that is, “art created with found objects from around the world”. Headlines consists of 12 pieces, comprised of various international newspaper headings and articles, which are cut out and put back together in definitive pattern sets. This painstaking process is then heightened in that all the cut outs, which take up the entire background of every canvas, aim to help represent the specific headline Terrazzo has gathered for each piece.  These assemblages are then painted over with black, heavy outlining and a splashy surrealistic colour palette in order to further emphasize the work’s focal slogan.  One example of this artistic method can be seen in Terrazzo’s “Deep Breath,” which illustrates a moody side silhouette of a young woman whose pulmonary system is painted over the newsprint, in vibrant brushy strokes. Terrazzo manages to balance her mixture of media in that her output both equally emphasizes a beautiful painting technique as well as the more mechanical aspect of newspaper assemblage. In this way Annie’s work does not allow it’s audience to shy away from the meta-textual components of her process as well as the layers of sub-meaning within each piece.

Headlines runs until July 1

Stella Melchiori