SLEEPING BEAUTY AWAKEN!

Title of exhibit: Sleeping Beauty Awaken!
Artists: tomolennon (JP)
Dates: March 13-23, 2008
Reception: Thursday March 13, 6-10pm
Location: Keep Six Contemporary, Toronto, Canada
938 Bathurst Street (north of Bloor street)

In celebration of “White day” we welcome artist tomolennon in his first solo show at Keep Six Contemporary (KSC) with his series titled “Sleeping Beauty Awaken”

tomolennon will also welcome the photo documentary titled “The Unseen Sleeping Beauty” by photographer Neil Schmidt and also a live photo shoot under the direction of Taca Ozawa

We invite you to this unique celebration and to enjoy, yes….marshmallows!

About White day
St. Valentine's Day in Japan is a day when women give the special men in their lives boxes of chocolate. To balance out the one-sidedness of this practice, White Day was invented for men to reciprocate such gifts. While Valentine's Day is an imported convention, White Day (on March 14) is a purely Japanese creation.

Just as with the giving of chocolates on Valentine's, the driving force behind the popularization of White Day was a confectionery maker. A company making marshmallows launched a campaign in 1965 urging men to repay valentine gifts with soft, fluffy marshmallows. The name White Day comes from the color of the candy, and at first it was called Marshmallow Day.

About Sleeping Beauty Awaken!
Sleeping Beauty Awaken is specific selection from a collection of portraits in which women's dream worlds are being visualized. Women appear as princesses amongst backdrops adorned by their subconscious delights. Each woman is living in a special dream world that she distinctively idealized. A woman who loves shoes would probably be wearing a pair of Manolo's in her dream, or a woman who dreams of having blonde hair might have shiny, luminous blonde hair in her dream. For it's the correlation between women and fashion (Hairstyle, makeup, and clothes) which holds the key to reflecting their personalities.

tomolennon managed to beautifully manifest these women's ideal images with the help of accomplished Toronto fashion industry artists. He and these photographers, makeup artists, hairstylists, and fashion designers composed various scenes in which the women fall asleep elegantly nestled within a web of their ideal images in order to capture these imaginary characters as authentic. After which, this imaginary world was conceived as a painting on a prodigious, life sized canvas by tomolennon. At this point, you find two diverse forms co-existing: photos depicting the real, and paintings depicting the imagination. Finally, actual dresses were hand sewn onto the canvases in order to convey that the dream world is not simply the imagination, but in fact, a real image. In other words, these dresses are a means of amalgamating the imagination with reality.

Simply and beautifully, Sleeping Beauty is tomolennon's Ode' to the collective conception that fashion embodies people's feelings as well as their minds. People have been expressing themselves consciously and unconsciously through fashion for centuries and will continue to do so.

For any further details, please contact ask@keep6c.com or call the gallery at 1 647 436 6594