THE CONFIDENT LESBIAN

Narwhal Projects is pleased to present Tibi Tibi Neuspiel’s first solo exhibition with the gallery as the inaugural show in our newly renovated space in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. Neuspiel works in a diverse range of media including sculpture, performance, digital imaging and video. Best known for his deft use of pigmented wax as medium for his wryly humourous sculptures, in The Confident Lesbian, Neuspiel shows an ambitious series of new pieces that purport to mine the banal for the prophetic and haunting.

Embracing the propositional nature of his purposefully ambivalent polemical works, Neuspiel here presents pieces that form a spatial conversation referencing both tangible understandings of the natural world, and elements culled from popular culture chosen for, or repurposed to present, subtly sinister qualities.

Waxing Gibbous is a low-relief wall work that vibrates between encaustic painting and wax sculpture—the former an antiquated and delicate painting method, the latter conjuring reference to the celebrity portraiture of Madame Tussaud’s museums—references that neatly bookend Neuspiel’s methodology and range of enquiry. Here the face of the moon is lushly revealed in the sort of stark detail not available to the naked eye, calling up the understanding of the world attained through the machinery of scientific enquiry.

The tone of Neuspiel’s exhibition finds its crux in Infinite Shrimp Ring: pleasing in its faithful invocation of the common party food it reproduces, it becomes deeply satisfying in its formal doubling into the sideways figure-8 that indicates the eternal. Here the tiny waxen simulated crustacean hors d’oeuvres deftly shift to invoke the Ouroboros snake that bites its own tail, and perhaps the most vast of philosophical ideas.

In The Confident Lesbian, Tibi Tibi Neuspiel evolves his visual personal language, presenting a range of works that function as an installation seeming to cull the oracular from the most common of objects, but with such dry humour that the viewer is generously left with space to consider the intention behind the apparent revelations.

Tibi Tibi Neuspiel presented a commissioned performance work, The Tie-Break with artist Geoffrey Pugen, at the 2011 iteration of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. He has been included in group shows at galleries across North America and in Europe, including Creature of Comfort (NYC), Xpace (Toronto), Red Bull 381 Projects (Toronto), Angell Gallery (Toronto), and others. His work has been selected for presentation at international art fairs including the NY Art Book Fair (NYC), Art Basel (Basel) and Art Amsterdam (Amsterdam).

Opening Reception:
Thursday April 5, 2012
7-10pm