Life Lines Opening Reception on May 5 at IONA Studio Gallery and Projects

Bruno Billio is a Toronto-based artist whose practise moves fluidly through vocabularies related to contemporary art and design. From sculpture and arrangements of stacked objects to furniture and other functional items, he creates visual relationships that express ideas and emotions through matter, light, shadow, colour, texture, form, and line.

His exhibition, Life Lines has been developed on-site over the course of a month-long residency at Iona Studio from April 4th through May 4th, 2022. Arriving on site with some furniture, basic tools, a few rolls of coloured paper tape, and without overly determined plans or preconceptions, Billio created two distinct bodies of work for Iona’s two gallery spaces.

In the West Gallery, Bruno has created the most recent iteration of his signature, Tron spaces using family and personal furniture pieces to which he has carefully applied yellow florescent tape along the existing lines and contours of their forms. Through ultra-violet lighting, the entire space is transformed into an immersive, otherworldly environment. Layered references abound, from the 1980s sci-fi cult movie of the same title, to virtual and digital technologies, 3D-rendering graphics, sub-atomic and particle physics, and to glow-in-the-dark novelty. In the Main Gallery, a similar, carefully handcrafted taping process is used by the artist to create wall-mounted works on paper, free-standing screens, and a sculpture made of vinyl tape. For the series of newly created works in the Main Gallery, Billio works intuitively, applying paper tape, overlapping and layered directly onto paper and medium-density fibreboard supports.

Visit www.ionastudio.art