Opening Reception for Community Portraits 2023-2024: Wyn Geleynse
Thu, Jan 16
|TAP Centre for Creativity
Join us in LAB 203 on January 16th 5:00-7:00PM. Two portraits will be on display each month from January - May as part of Community Portraits 2023-2024. January will be featuring "Almost Faidat" and "Almost David". The artist will be present.


Time & Location
Jan 16, 2025, 5:00 p.m.
TAP Centre for Creativity, 203 Dundas St, London, ON N6A 1G4, Canada
About The Event
Community Portraits 2023 - 2024: Wyn Geleynse, will be displaying two portraits each month from January - May 2025. The first instillation of this series "Almost Faidat" and "Almost David", will be on display in LAB 203 from January 13 - February 1, 2025. Join us for the opening reception on January 16, 5:00-7:00PM.
About the Exhibition:
"Community doesn’t just define a place where citizens live together, or where a group has something in common, characteristics or interests shared — a community is a gathering of people with values that include helping and inspiring others. Wyn Geleynse’s series Community Portraits embodies, illuminates and celebrates those multiple facets of what a community means.
Originally conceived as a simple exercise in painting the portrait of a close friend and fellow artist, Geleynse saw a bigger project as more friends and acquaintances from his walk in life — from the person who prepares and serves his coffee, colleagues from the arts community, a shop keeper at his local stereo shop, co-workers at the Mission Store where Geleynse volunteers twice a week, the woman who cleans the building that houses his studio — various members of Geleynse’s community stepped forward to be caught in paint on his paper canvas. With forty-one portraits, a series was born from that simple exercise.
Almost, because both subject and artist had to agree to the finished work, and two portraits of forty-one didn’t quite make the cut. They exist but with black bars over the eyes, a playful gesture implying that the artist doesn’t always get things quite right. That playful nuance is, however, part of the process in all of Geleynse’s portraits: each portrait is entitled Almost followed by the name of the subject, suggesting the artist’s slight insecurity in delivering a perfectly rendered portrait, but equally that all subjects have a defining “Je ne sais quoi” that is their personal stamp of character and identity. All beauty comes with flaws. As Leonard Cohen sang, “there is a crack, a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.” Geleynse’s portraits capture some of those “cracks” and equally, let that radiant light out of each of his subjects.
This series of portraits is presented one or two at a time for a month, beginning at Milos Craft Beer Emporium last September to December and now at TAP Centre for Creativity. It’s an unusual method to display an exhibit but one that almost mimics the way we encounter our friends and cohorts and acquaintances in daily life, a pleasant reminder that our communal time together is slightly fragmented.
It’s said that it takes an entire village to raise a child, and the equivalency is that it takes a community to make each of our lives function, from the quotidian details in our walk of life, to the bigger picture of what makes life meaningful and colourful. In a series of work that is bigger than the sum of its parts, Geleynse’s Community Portraits also proves that it takes a whole community to inspire an artist."
— Vince Cherniak Dec.14, 2024