Mina Totino
Mina Totino is a Canadian painter based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Totino's work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto and Berlin. Totino first came to prominence in the 1985 Young Romantics exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her work has been exhibited notably in Vancouver at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Artspeak, SFU Galleries, Western Front, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and most recently the West Vancouver Art Museum. Internationally her work was shown at the Centro d'Arte Contemporanea, Ticino, Italy, Centre d'Art Centemporain and Dialogai Geneva, Switzerland, Latvian Center of Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia, Canada House, London, UK and Galerie Likorfabrik, Berlin, Germany among others.
Image credit: Stan Douglas | Exhibition view "Twisting"
Past Exhibition at MRG | In the Garden
May 22 - June 29, 2021
“In the Garden” entwines works by well-established Vancouver artist Mina Totino and up and coming artist Maggee Day. The thought of the garden comprises and encompasses many phenomena of our daily lives. It is at this time of the year that the garden, whether it is a collection of small pots of flowers on a patio or a lavish backyard or public garden it is something that surrounds most of us daily, consciously or not.
Vibrant colors and strong brush strokes bring the semblance of a garden and nature inside the gallery space, emphasizing Maggee Day's approach for this exhibited series “Doorstep view”. In her painterly process Day depicts the view of her doorstep, a view from inside the home into the outside, into the garden inspiring bold abstract views.
Mina Totino's works presented in this exhibition are part of her most recent exploration of the monochrome resulting in monochrome works – not really being monochrome. The compositions defined by multilayers of color and tactile attributes elude any classification or predetermined associations, however, like a view in a garden, delicately evolving in front of your eyes - “[...] quiet, slow, enveloping, like a waltz; delicate, fragile, and on the verge of materiality breaking or losing thought or form. [...]”[i]
The layout of the individual works of Day and Totino throughout the gallery space is suggestive of the garden and full circle of nature, from subtle green tones in “Doorstep view 4” to “Doorstep view 7” to Totino's “Turkey Umber (Williamsburg)”, reminiscent of spring and blooming, decomposition, decay and renewal.
Vibrant colors and strong brush strokes bring the semblance of a garden and nature inside the gallery space, emphasizing Maggee Day's approach for this exhibited series “Doorstep view”. In her painterly process Day depicts the view of her doorstep, a view from inside the home into the outside, into the garden inspiring bold abstract views.
Mina Totino's works presented in this exhibition are part of her most recent exploration of the monochrome resulting in monochrome works – not really being monochrome. The compositions defined by multilayers of color and tactile attributes elude any classification or predetermined associations, however, like a view in a garden, delicately evolving in front of your eyes - “[...] quiet, slow, enveloping, like a waltz; delicate, fragile, and on the verge of materiality breaking or losing thought or form. [...]”[i]
The layout of the individual works of Day and Totino throughout the gallery space is suggestive of the garden and full circle of nature, from subtle green tones in “Doorstep view 4” to “Doorstep view 7” to Totino's “Turkey Umber (Williamsburg)”, reminiscent of spring and blooming, decomposition, decay and renewal.
Past Exhibition at MRG | Twisting
June 27 - August 1, 2020
It is the case in layered pieces of meanings, that entering from the side would render more intelligible than the understanding coming from the center; the human, man made center of comprehension. Mina Totino’s recent paintings make the frames/borders/margins the entrance into constructions with no emergency exit; no boundary that when crossed would contextualize the lived. No way to instrumentalize detective perceptions. Trying to locate/speak of what is happening just in the front of each painting, Totino has the surgical detective perception to describe them as “stronger from underneath”. This makes margins/borders much more porous. From the front and center the three paintings in the exhibition All Blue, September and October could be grabbed/categorized as gestural abstraction. Although Totino is precise in them not being either landscape, figuration or abstraction. An important code given by the artist to carry through the exhibition.
In All Blue, September and October viewing is made unstable, as the contrast between the front and the margins of paintings, created by the amount of layers–the painted edges of the depth of the canvas and the reflection of the this onto the wall, in different qualities of light bounces the eye and gives movement to the paintings. The paintings where done with a small brush, which makes the painting process more laborious and slower. Totino notes that in a layer, this is responding to the “male idea” of “big brush” and “big mark”. In a more circular or spiral than arrow forms.
One of the detective instruments could be played about the Mondrian like gesture of being in the edge and going over it, or of holding an uncanny resemblance to the tradition of color-field painting lead by Frankenthaler or as Totino herself explains about this series of paintings, that some of the measurements for the canvases where taken out of Ryman’s canvases. This doesn’t translate or give an entrance to meaning but border the inside. In the same manner the discontinuous gestures on September and October can be for a moment located as bordering the inside or the outside. In the former, the organic-like shapes border between layers and the three gestural marks are meeting the physical margin. The latter, where two similar gestural marks don’t have to both be in the physical border to be perceived as bordering, heavily due to the contrasting colors but also because of how the painting is applied.
The contrast of the small paintings, some with what Totino describes as “goofy frames”; create a similar fluid sense of instability putting the difference created in a symphonic/chaotic dialogue. Exchanging between them and with us. The layers in this case are not so much the amount of paint, but the propositions of coming into being. Any frame that Totino chooses would then further the effect that the painting is a proposition of being that is always a dialogue. As if the marks were made in a state of palpable acceleration or counter acceleration, as it relates and narrates a difference between more than one velocity, bordering the viewers own sense of movement, acting as a witness.
Text by Oscar Domingo Rajme
In All Blue, September and October viewing is made unstable, as the contrast between the front and the margins of paintings, created by the amount of layers–the painted edges of the depth of the canvas and the reflection of the this onto the wall, in different qualities of light bounces the eye and gives movement to the paintings. The paintings where done with a small brush, which makes the painting process more laborious and slower. Totino notes that in a layer, this is responding to the “male idea” of “big brush” and “big mark”. In a more circular or spiral than arrow forms.
One of the detective instruments could be played about the Mondrian like gesture of being in the edge and going over it, or of holding an uncanny resemblance to the tradition of color-field painting lead by Frankenthaler or as Totino herself explains about this series of paintings, that some of the measurements for the canvases where taken out of Ryman’s canvases. This doesn’t translate or give an entrance to meaning but border the inside. In the same manner the discontinuous gestures on September and October can be for a moment located as bordering the inside or the outside. In the former, the organic-like shapes border between layers and the three gestural marks are meeting the physical margin. The latter, where two similar gestural marks don’t have to both be in the physical border to be perceived as bordering, heavily due to the contrasting colors but also because of how the painting is applied.
The contrast of the small paintings, some with what Totino describes as “goofy frames”; create a similar fluid sense of instability putting the difference created in a symphonic/chaotic dialogue. Exchanging between them and with us. The layers in this case are not so much the amount of paint, but the propositions of coming into being. Any frame that Totino chooses would then further the effect that the painting is a proposition of being that is always a dialogue. As if the marks were made in a state of palpable acceleration or counter acceleration, as it relates and narrates a difference between more than one velocity, bordering the viewers own sense of movement, acting as a witness.
Text by Oscar Domingo Rajme
News
"Mina Totino - Slow and immersive paintings invite viewers to take their time"
Review of our show "Twisting" with Mina Totino
by Galleries West
Review of our show "Twisting" with Mina Totino
by Galleries West
"The Eyes Have Walls: Nicole Ondre and Mina Totino"
MINA TOTINO at the West Vancouver Art Museum
September 30 - December 12, 2020
This exhibition features paintings and ceramic works by Vancouver-based artists, Nicole Ondre and Mina Totino. Ondre and Totino challenge the mechanical processes of their materials, and through their experimentations cause their artistic media to elude fixed forms.
Ondre creates her paintings on tracing paper that is coated in tinted glue, suspending them over ceramic bars or tying them into bows. Totino’s paintings start with a single veil of colour, upon which she builds additional layers of different paints and finishes the edges with more colour. There is an inherent uncertainty in these works: the surfaces and materials are encouraged to defy their formal limitations.
Layers of colour are of equal importance to Ondre and Totino’s ceramic works. These are not made to be functional, but neither are they wholly decorative. Ondre ties elaborate knots from extruded clay and eschews glaze in favor of paint. Totino fashions pots in variable shapes and sizes, applying layers of glaze, like paint, that result in multi-coloured asymmetrical patterns. For both, their ceramics are made with an element of instability, in the same way that they cannot always at first discern the end result of their paintings.
Taken together, these paintings and ceramic works encourage a dialogue about the act of art-making. These works contain an inter-play between materials, such as clay and paint. The experimental processes held in the artists’ physical and mental labour is of paramount importance, even more so than the meaning of each individual piece. The layering, knotting, and shaping of their materials results in an amalgamation of different forms, united by elements of unpredictability in their making. At first glance, their materials are self-evident, but on closer inspection, surprises wait around every corner.
Ondre creates her paintings on tracing paper that is coated in tinted glue, suspending them over ceramic bars or tying them into bows. Totino’s paintings start with a single veil of colour, upon which she builds additional layers of different paints and finishes the edges with more colour. There is an inherent uncertainty in these works: the surfaces and materials are encouraged to defy their formal limitations.
Layers of colour are of equal importance to Ondre and Totino’s ceramic works. These are not made to be functional, but neither are they wholly decorative. Ondre ties elaborate knots from extruded clay and eschews glaze in favor of paint. Totino fashions pots in variable shapes and sizes, applying layers of glaze, like paint, that result in multi-coloured asymmetrical patterns. For both, their ceramics are made with an element of instability, in the same way that they cannot always at first discern the end result of their paintings.
Taken together, these paintings and ceramic works encourage a dialogue about the act of art-making. These works contain an inter-play between materials, such as clay and paint. The experimental processes held in the artists’ physical and mental labour is of paramount importance, even more so than the meaning of each individual piece. The layering, knotting, and shaping of their materials results in an amalgamation of different forms, united by elements of unpredictability in their making. At first glance, their materials are self-evident, but on closer inspection, surprises wait around every corner.
Photo: Stan Douglas, 2020.