Propeller Art Gallery presents…
November 12 – 30, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 15, 1 – 6 pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, November 30, 3 pm
In this series, Nothing But Blue Skies, I maintain that while skies may not always be blue and clear, we see the same things when we look up. In these prints, I explore the colours of sky, land, and water. Most of these prints depict Rabbit Lake, in Northern Ontario, where my family has a cabin. The area has been a touchstone for my work in the past. There are also a couple of nods to my love of Seattle in prints of boats moored at the Center for Wooden Boats.
Much of my work depicts the natural world, and for close to 15 years, I have worked mainly in reductive woodcuts, linocuts and monoprints made from used plates. I began as a painter, but I have found my perfect medium with these techniques. Karen Klee-Atlin is originally from the Toronto area, where she studied at the Ontario College of Art. Currently based in Toronto, she teaches at Open Studio and in her private studio located in Cabbagetown.
These drawings extend my fixation with geometry as an incredibly fruitful drawing method — reductive but expansive at the same time. The purpose for Art, the reason we do it, is understanding; understanding how language works as a sense conductor or understanding what we can say to each other, among other things.
In a graphical search for understanding, I overload my paper with colour, and with compositions of growth and natural things. The constraints of geometric drawing are complicated by my love of water flowing, things growing, fire licking, and coils coiling. I view all the drawings as shallow piles where stories may be stored.
David is currently an Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, and is Vice-Chair of the University’s Research Ethics Board. He holds a PhD from the Glasgow School of Art, an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York.
This body of work stylistically follows my earlier work in its use of random images, some new and some repetitive, against various backdrops, executed primarily through an automatist painting approach and the use of stencils.
One common thread that weaves throughout my paintings is the ubiquitous presence of the cabin, which I have been including in my work for the last forty-plus years. This simple, isometric structure can conjure up a whole array of meanings from the warmth of home, family or country to the more sinister praxis of homelessness or domestic conflicts.
Joseph Muscat is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, AOCA 1981, University of Toronto, B.Ed. 1975 and the Glendon College, York University, B.A.Hons. 1973. He has also studied at the École des beaus arts d’Aix-en-Provence, France and did a series of lithography workshops at the Atelier des réalisations graphique de Québec and at the Tailleurs d’images in Quebec City.
He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe, South America and South Korea. He is widely collected in public, corporate and private collections and has received project, travel and exhibition support grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. His art has been reproduced in art books, textbooks, novels and magazine covers.
