Eventide is an exhibition that brings together the work of Stanzie Tooth (Toronto, ON) and David Kaarsemaker (Victoria, BC). These artists investigate the attributes of light in two distinct series: Stanize Tooth's The Blue Hour and David Kaarsemaker's Sun Dogs. Although their individual endpoints differ, light is both an atmosphere and an active force that reveals and obscures the autonomy of the natural world.

Tooth’s nocturnal scenes take place in self-sustaining ecologies where flora and fauna partake in their own fragile cycles of life that do not depend on humans, who exist as viewers under the moonlight's attraction.In Kaarsemaker’s paintings, light becomes an outward response to geological and immeasurable moments in time as he looks at monumental terrains of rock, trees, and horizons.

Together, the works move from intimate encounters with the landscape toward a speculative realism. Organic forms become architectures. Light plays off these structures and continues past what they saw or what we see.

Stanzie Tooth’s latest drawings consider human experiences such as love, caregiving, and motherhood in nature. This series, The Blue Hour, features figures with flowers for eyes that appear to be converging with the landscape. Tooth turns to a visual strategy that builds relationships between figure and ground, existing as entangled in-between the foreground, mid-ground, and background of her compositions, almost as if suggesting, whether we acknowledge it or not, the natural will persisted long before and much longer after us. These absent-like figures are spectral visual symbols of the boundary between oneself and the wild. The creatures illustrated in her exist in some form of a circadian rhythm. The significance of light as daytime or the lack thereof as nighttime also plays into her largely non-linear narrative storytelling approach. Local pollinators, such as the Luna Moth and the Monarch, appear in her compositions as symbolic stand-ins for our human experience with growing, birth, and death– Their inclusion reflects our brief lifespan within landscapes that persist beyond the corporeal.

In Sun Dogs, Kaarsemaker turns to an optical phenomenon in which faintly coloured light flanks the sun when it rests low on the horizon. The experience of encountering this atmospheric event informs a body of work concerned with iridescence and perceptual instability. Developed through extended walks in remote landscapes, the paintings bring distant vistas into dialogue with close observation, collapsing proximity and expanse, enclosure and horizon. Built through successive layers of faintly pigmented primary glazes, with paint added and removed at each stage, the surfaces allow light to emanate from within the image itself. Referencing both stained glass and LCD screens, the resulting glow hovers between natural and synthetic registers, situating perception at a threshold where the atmospheric becomes structural.

David Kaarsemaker

This Rock 2

Oil on canvas
27 x 36 Inches
2026