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Menno Kitty
New works by Andrea Hooge
April 16 – May 2, 2015
 
Menno Kitty features a new and colourful group of oil paintings by Andrea Hooge created to convey a childlike air of playfulness and humour. Drawing from her childhood interpretations and understandings of the world around her, she includes images of kittens, dolls, and babies mixed in with an array of objects that act as personal symbols. These symbols hold deeper personal meaning and are ones she has gathered through her life to reflect some of these childhood understandings. See photos from the show on Flickr >

Andrea Hooge is an artist living and working out of her home studio in East Vancouver. She earned her BA from the University of the Fraser Valley, where she majored in Psychology and minored in Visual Arts. After her schooling, she sought a vocation in social work, but after several years of attempting to balance her work with her desire to create art, she changed direction. Since 2012, Andrea has been able to dedicate herself more fully to her passion for creating art. She has shown her work in various group shows in Vancouver, and has had two solo exhibitions, titled Dolly and Scratch.

Andrea often draws inspiration from the nostalgia of vintage magazines and children’s books. Much of her work has been focused mainly on figurative oil paintings and scratchboards. While many of her painted works are on wood or hardboard panel, she also creates wood and scratchboard cutouts to move away from conventional shapes. These have been made to stand alone or overlap to create larger and more dynamic pieces.

It’s José’s last Vancouver show before moving to Toronto. It’s his goodbye party too, and he hopes to thank everyone in person who has supported him over the years in this incredible city. The series of work he will be exhibiting is his study of birds and their anatomy in motion. He breaks apart their structure and expresses their dynamic movement through gestural stokes and geometric shapes. See photos from the show in the Flickr album >

Read an interview with José on Vancity Buzz >

Raised in a household of Spanish heritage, Jose Rivas only started speaking English at the age of five, after distinct impressions were made on him by his family’s culture of origin. Over the years his eccentric personality and affluence of artistry was primed through Capilano University’s Illustration and Design program (IDEA). Jose’s work is described as representing ‘the chaos of life, juxtaposed with its underlying beauty, expressed and complimented by saturated, alluring colours, and repetitive gestural strokes.’ His paintings often speak of his attraction to the complexities of life and that which we impose on ourselves to make life colourful.