from Globe and Mail, By GARY MICHAEL DAULT, Saturday, February 5, 2005 - Page R10

Libby Hague and Yael Brotman At Loop ...These two handsome exhibitions by two gifted Toronto-based artists fit together almost seamlessly. Libby Hague's consists of an epically scaled wall-work installation titled Everything Needs Everything. The piece employs her brilliant gifts as a printmaker to effect a gallery-long curtain wall of woodcuts -- Hague aptly describes it as "claustrophobic and immersive" -- which, in accumulation, offers an apocalyptic passion play envisaged as taking place under Toronto's Gardiner Expressway. Amid streamer-like falls of cut paper, aerial acrobats -- girls tumbling in space -- plummet from the heavens to protect a gaggle of "perfect and fearless" babies from numberless threats to their well-being -- including marauding dogs and jackals and wild boars. The modular motif making up this titanic, rather literary work, is Hague's coloured woodcut of a single glass pendant from a chandelier, which is used everywhere (there are hundreds of them) as a building-block for her persuasive and exciting paper epic. Yael Brotman's Off in the Distance also involves the chandelier (indeed it inspired Hague's use of it). What Brotman has done is to provide a few succulent paintings of chandeliers and hanging lamps and to accompany them with many small works painted on cubes of ash wood. "I conceived of the chandelier pieces as precious stones along the trajectory of a beaded necklace," Brotman wrote in a recent e-mail. The little ash paintings are depictions of everyday vignettes (a crow in a tree, a road grader, a girl reading), while the interspersed chandeliers serve as "big, sparkly, graceful, imaginative events, beyond ourselves. . . ."