Bio:
As a design professor, photographer and artist, I enjoy experimenting with spaces and images and observing how they inform us about how they are commonly used and viewed. I explore ideas, concepts and problems from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Art and design engage with aspects of everyday life, often pointing to and questioning what we take for granted. The ordinary can be made extraordinary if viewed from a fresh perspective. I seek to find and communicate new points of view through my own experimental images and their manipulations. Often this involves reframing subjects and recontextualizing them, leading to ambiguous interpretations.
When viewers encounter my work, I hope they begin to look at the world a little differently, if ever so slightly. My take on reality is shaped by my experiences, culture and norms, while someone else’s reality is shaped by theirs. Because of this, each will encounter my work through a different lens.
I am particularly interested in distorting or reframing familiar subjects, so they feel slightly unfamiliar. When my children were young, they were fascinated by simple discoveries: a flower, a toy, something they had never noticed before. I realized that over time I had lost some of that sense of wonder. Habit had made many everyday objects almost invisible. By altering or distorting recognizable forms, I try to slow the viewer down, encouraging them to look again, to see the world anew.
I think of art as existing along a spectrum. At one end is the craft of art, where skill and technical accomplishment can be appreciated. At the other end is art that challenges your preconceptions. My work strives to balance visual engagement with an invitation to think.
The “Ship Happens!” Series
Boats are meant to be steady, graceful things. In Ship Happens, sails warp, hulls bend, and vessels dissolve into abstraction, turning harbours into places of chaos. Printed on birch plywood and painted in moody ochres, these boats borrow the drama of the Old Masters while refusing to behave like proper vessels.
Alongside them sits another fleet: vintage irons dismantled and reassembled into miniature leisure craft. Balanced on a wooden ironing board, they transform tools of domestic labour into objects of play. Ironing was once an unavoidable household chore, part of the cycle of care. Boating was tied to labour through fishing, trade, and transport. Today, both have shifted roles: ironing appears mostly before special occasions, and boating has become a pastime of freedom and escape.
Both practices once demanded skill and patience. Now automation and global economies have transformed them, yet these boats of iron carry quiet stories of labour and ingenuity, showing how memories endure in the objects left behind.
Together, the works blur the boundaries between work and leisure. Boats sag, irons set sail, and traces of skill, care, and memory mix with a wink. Sometimes things bend, break, or drift off course. Sometimes, SHIP just happens.
Review: “Ship Happens!” at Gallery 1313, Toronto
Review: Miho Sawada and Viz Saraby at Gallery 1313 – ARTORONTO
The focus of this article will be on the work of Viz Saraby in the members’ showing space known as the Cell Gallery, but first let me say something about the exhibition in the Main Gallery at Gallery 1313. It consists of the drawings, preparatory maquettes, and various ephemera concerning, the late Miho Sawada, who died in 2023. The exhibition is essentially a celebration of her distinguished career. Sawada was born 1944 in Osaka, Japan. She studied Fine Arts in Kyoto, and then moved to Canada where she soon enrolled at Toronto’s New School of Art in 1969. During her long career she taught at various institutions including the Ontario College of Art and The University of Guelph. Little of her artwork is on display, largely because she was a public sculptor, so her work must necessarily remain elsewhere. They can be found in Canada, United States and Japan in particular.
Saraby’s exhibition in the Cell Gallery is comprised of small sculptures of boats modelled from vintage domestic irons, and ten, what we shall calls ‘paintings’ on boards. She has had a decades long career in interior design and as a professor. Consequently she is very familiar with a variety of industrial processes employed in the craft of art and design. She does not constrain herself to one medium as many traditional artists do. Instead Saraby explores many production techniques and materials. Her paintings are testament to this fact.
There are several stages in the production of her paintings – hence my reluctance to describe them as paintings as such. First, she has shot a series of photos of the quayside and boats located in the Georgian Bay town of Meaford where she resides. The images are digitally distorted. Next she uses a laser printer to etch an image onto a piece of birch veneered plywood. Then she paints the board to bring back the image. Finally the surface is treated in order to give it a uniform lustre. The pallette – ochres, sepia and other earthy colours, – Saraby tells us in her artist’s statement, is deliberately reminiscent of old master paintings, or at least how we imagine them.
But the final look of these works is not wholly deliberative. Rather what ultimately comes out is informed by the materials and techniques she uses. Birch plywood, for instance, has a naturally warm tone that is accentuated by the the pallette she chooses. Also, the distortion she applies to the imagery is encouraged by the digital software Saraby employs. That is not to suggest she produces the work unreflectingly, but instead it is to point out that she enters into a dialogue with her chosen materials and techniques.
These images remind me of David Hockney’s photomontages, where he took a series of close up photos of a subject – a person, a landscape etc., – and created a collage from them. In Hockney’s case, very often there is a temporal element to the photomontages given that the subject is taken over a period of time. This adds to the distortion of the finished overall image, giving it a cubistic quality. For Saraby, on the other hand, each image originates from a single photo, so there is a unique point of view in each. The distortion she creates digitally is therefore wholly perspectival – the boats and landscape are bent and warped until the viewer is disorientated. The everyday becomes slightly grotesque, disturbing. But all the time the image is integral or continuous.
I noted how Saraby works by entering into a dialogue with the materials and techniques she chooses. This essentially experimental approach is not confined to pictures. In this show she also presents seven boats modelled out of old clothing irons. Indeed, there is an affinity between the overall shape of an iron and a boat that she exploits here. Nonetheless, there is a child-like quality to these sculptures, given that the irons are only minimally altered, so that the viewer must fill in the gap between these two otherwise disparate items, i.e., imagine the irons as boats – just as a child, for instance, might imagine a large pile of dirt as a mountain. This imaginative dimension, combined with the toy-sized scale of the sculptures, makes them quite charming and playful pieces.
Saraby points to a parallel between her transformed irons and the boats she photographs in the harbour, namely the shift from work to leisure. Historically boats have been working vessels, transporting goods in particular. Now, in Meaford at least, boats are primarily leisure vehicles, things for recreation. Likewise, her irons, once dismantled and reassembled, become playful objects. In addition, I detect a nostalgia to the work, pointing to a way of life lost to time. These works have a quiet beauty to them.
Hugh Alcock
Images are courtesy of the artist.
*Exhibition information: Miho Sawada, Exhibition of Works and Viz Saraby, Ship Happens, November 26 – December 7, 2025, Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen St West, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 1 – 5 pm, Sunday 1 – 4 pm.
Ship Happens! at L.E. Shore Art Gallery
Ship Happens! at Meaford Hall
Review: “Conestruction” at Gallery 1313
Destruction is Creation
Walking into a construction area is not ideal. It’s overwhelming, filled with bright lights, loud machinery, and in a constant state of disorder. Viz Saraby brings this setting to Gallery 1313’s Cell Gallery, but with a purpose. Chaos is taken and reshaped into a creative force, encapsulating the philosophy of “Conefusionism”. Here, confusion, fragmentation, and ambiguity are not destructive forces, but rather, forces of creation.
The cones, a recurring motif throughout the show (and perhaps different variants of the “Conefusionism” mascot simply named Cone), serves as a metaphor for this idea. They are more than just mere objects wearing different hats and coloured differently, but rather, they represent the disordered process by which new forms and ideas emerge. In “Conefusionism”, the cone’s inherent impermanence and workplace instability mirror the unpredictability of the creative process, but also, the city of Toronto itself. Many of Toronto’s safe spaces have been closed down in favour of more infrastructure and condos around the city. For instance, many LGBTQ+ post-pandemic have been closed down, either due to the crippling economic effects of the pandemic or the city’s relentless pursuit of more luxury condos. The instability that we face on a daily basis is brought to the forefront, and in a more controlled and “safe” environment, despite the fact that you have to sign a waiver before even entering the exhibit!
Saraby seems to imbue each cone with a sense of humor and diversity. They are all characters in Cone’s narrative, where we follow it around the city where it falls into potholes or even looks “inward” on itself. One cone wears a teapot for a hat, blending domesticity with absurdity; another wears a wheel, evoking a sense of confusion that is almost Magritte-like. But what’s most interesting is the big fluffy orange cone in the center of the gallery, where viewers are invited to touch it, breaking the boundary between the observer and the object, but also, creating a clever commentary on safe spaces themselves. The fluffy cone evokes this–it’s comforting, but also raises questions about the intentions behind the system that put them in place.
This playful engagement seemed to soften my sense of confusion, just like my brief conversation with Viz Saraby during the reception. I asked her about her piece right on the floor in front of the gallery that she deemed as “city checkers”; a black-and-white checkerboard with cones on one side and pieces of trash on the other. When I asked Viz about this piece, she simply said, “It’s a game between the two biggest issues in Toronto – who’s going to win? The overwhelming amount of construction, or the trash overflowing in our streets?”. The interactivity in this part of the exhibit is what I found fun. No matter what, you’re always going to get a different outcome when one side “wins”, but neither feels very victorious.
The exhibit also features hand-crafted road signs that reinterpret the ones we encounter in everyday life. Instead of typical arrows, the cones now point the way. Stop signs, usually a command to halt, now become permissive and inviting, encouraging viewers to extend a hand rather than use it to push people away. One particular sign in this exhibit creates a sense of whimsy and serendipity, with its winding twists and turns on a sign that typically only portrays two different directions. This sign now has several twists, turns, and paths, encouraging viewers to follow their own unique path and embrace wherever it may lead. These signs transform the familiar into something fresh and cheeky, evoking a sense of community and belonging. This is just another way that Saraby has turned an everyday object into something new and playful.
This exhibit becomes a meditation on how creation and destruction are not opposites, but rather, two sides of the same coin. It is playful and tongue-in-cheek goodness that everyone will enjoy interacting with. Whether you’re spinning the wheel trying to figure out which cone you are or watching the videos of Cone’s adventures, this exhibit challenges us to rethink our relationship with uncertainty around us.
Victoria Filippo
Images are all Installation views of Viz Saraby, Conestruction. Courtesy of the artist.
*Exhibition information: Viz Saraby, Conestruction, October 10 – 20, 2024, Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 1 – 5 pm, Sun 1 – 4 pm
Below are some other examples of my work. Click on the image to see the full image:
Favourite artists:
M.C. Escher got me started and is probably my most important influence. He started me on the road to understanding and loving thought provoking art. My most recent find is James Nizam and his incredibly clever photographic works of his site specific installations.
The purpose of art:
To make you think about aspects of life from another perspective.
what makes life worthwhile:
A sense of purpose.
My first command if I had absolute power:
Reorganize our systems of government and the way we elect our leaders.
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