For those looking for a more intimate way of experience art, I would suggest visiting The Red Head Gallery. Located in a restored factory building located at 401 Richmond Street in downtown Toronto, the space offers us a nice escape from the mundane among art galleries, music galleries, publishers, shops, and a café. It’s one of my favourite places to visit impromptu in the city.

Next week, the gallery presents Galileo’s Falling Bodies by Nina Leo, in collaboration with Lee Henderson. Galileo’s Falling Bodies is a series of works that allegorically contemplate various states of discord through the movement, upset, and stasis of a teacup… Various moments of upheaval and recovery are captured and re-presented, collectively proposing an underlying beauty in surrender.

Nina Leo is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist working primarily in drawing, installation, performance and public practice. Her work examines how the contemporary terrain of fragmented, often virtual experience may affect us phenomenologically as experiences and interactions become ever more accessible, yet divested of direct multi-sensorial richness. Leo holds an MFA in Emerging Practices from the University of Buffalo, SUNY. She is also an exhibiting member of the Red Head Gallery.

Lee Henderson is a media-based artist from Saskatchewan. He has studied art in Canada and Germany, with talented professionals including Maria Vedder, Brian Eno, and Ellen Bromberg. Since completing his MFA in 2005, he has been furthering his time- and lens- based artistic practice while teaching photography and media art at the postsecondary level (currently at OCADU and Ryerson University). Recent and upcoming exhibitions and screenings include the Zero Film Festival (Los Angeles), The Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), The Rooms (St. John’s), Trinity Square Video, gallerywest, Artscape Youngplace, and YYZ (Toronto).

Always looking for something new or different to do and learn from, Galileo’s Falling Bodies sounds like an intriguing and perhaps challenging way to experience new art. I, for one, think it a good exercise for the mind and soul.

Nina Leo / Lee Henderson Galileo’s Falling Bodies, 2013 Pigment print on fibre, 29 x 43 in.