March 21 - April 27, 2019
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Tracy Collamore| A Doll's House | TDP Gallery
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Artist Statement:
A Doll’s House is a series of painted vignettes which capture the miniaturized preciousness of a dollhouse, its contents, and its inhabitants. These still-life arrangements redefine their roles and transform into uninhabitable interior spaces, implying an ominous dimension beyond the physicality of the objects and their settings. I draw on the familiarity of the set-ups I paint and create an authentic visual identity of genre scenes depicting domestic modernity. And yet, the images provoke the existence of an alternate, psychological reality beyond their immediate impression. By using these visual familiarities, I expose the implications of our societal structure, the confinements of domesticity and gender roles, and the iconography of childhood conditioning. These images are subtly terrifying as they expose the underbelly of our modern society’s expectations. |
Inside Out |East and West Galleries
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Mio Akashi
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Artist Statement:
AWAI - Place and Time My works are recollections of my passages, which capture impressive encounters of the surroundings – architectural elements, distinctive trees and natural landscapes - appealing to me at the right moment and place. "Awai", an ancient word of "Ma" in Japanese, has multiple meanings including timing, distance, space and balance. When it comes together I get the cue to press the shutter. Those photographic images are my drawing materials to unveil precious reminiscences. |
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Lisa Brody
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Artist Statement:
This work has been inspired by the baroque and rococo architecture and interiors that I visited in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious spaces in Egypt and Mexico. I was drawn to chandeliers within these sacred spaces, observing patterns and forms opening and closing, expanding and contracting, pulsating and bursting, growing and dying, layering and peeling, pushing, questioning, all with a sense of play. In this way, I experimented with a wide range of materials such as paints, papers, glues, bleach, ashes, powders, sprays, brushes, oils, solvents and varied organic materials. Through this process, decay, growth, accident and transformation was examined and revealed. |
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Anthony Carr
Artist Statement:
Big Bar Lake Ranch (2011) My approach to photography is often experimental, where transformations occur in-camera, at times producing semi-abstract imagery. I am fascinated by the behaviour of light and how its traces can be observed over elongated time periods. During my explorations I try to record both the visible and the invisible, to reveal something beyond our human perception. Over the years I have developed an appreciation for lo-fi techniques and in particular pinhole photography, and have designed and built a number of my own apparatus. The series of works in Big Bar Lake Ranch (2011) document an abandoned lakeside guest ranch in the rural Cariboo region of Western Canada. A throwback to a long-forgotten era of cattle farming and pioneering spirit, the ranch today stands awkwardly amongst an ever-increasing settlement of affluent Vancouverites’ second homes. I was drawn to capture this fading monument to the past, before the inevitable chainsaw of progress changes this part of Canada forever. I have allowed the condition of the deteriorating building to dictate the look and feel of the photographs by utilising the unusual interplay of sunlight that seeps through every crack, hole and missing roof tile. Penetrating into the dingy spaces inside, this light forces its way into the shadows, turning into a cacophony over time. Light records over light, image over image, which permits us to witness something impossible to see with the naked eye. |
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Jodi Colella
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Artist Statement:
Balancing tradition and innovation I use needlework to infuse renewed power to craft traditions, engage the senses and explore the human condition. Found objects – the everyday and invisible – are reworked, repurposed, and placed on a pedestal for scrutiny where the psychological is made physical in the way that one form materializes from another. Influenced by my travels, I draw from historical and cultural experiences to create sculptures that capture the remarkably universal human impulse, from prehistory to the present, of rationalizing purpose and place. Acting like watch-over-you totems of the intangible, they investigate the complex, often entangled qualities of power, fear and the emergence of identity. The practice of time intensive processes in the making promotes contemplation and resolve – whether it be the sting of an insect that presents as larger than life or the painful realization of inevitable truths. Through the use of evocative materials, humor and surrealist imagery I hope to elicit simultaneous reactions of whimsy and threat, to engage viewers to question, and to beckon the urge to touch. |
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Kate Gordon
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Artist Statement:
An intense engagement with impossible spaces and simultaneous conflicting worlds has forced me into unknown territory where the picture plane is at moments an installation diorama inlaid with video and burgeoning on becoming a pop-up book. I consider myself a visual storyteller steeped in the language of painting. However, my stories are neither rational nor linear, their beginnings are unpacked from dreams; giving me a glimmer of the creature that culture has created. Inventing imagery without an observable source involves countless iterations, each one compressing the one before it. For this reason, collage is the most powerful and agile tool at my disposal. Carving up oil paintings, poking holes into acrylic skies and dissecting watercolor drawings for the sole purpose of stitching the everyday and absurd together. This duplication, fragmentation and instability directly relates to the precarious political and social environment that society inhabits today; forced to navigate the world through a lens mediated by technology and overwhelmed by a surplus of information with no hierarchical structure. I am attempting to build my own window into contemporary painting: one that is playful in its use of media and comically dark in its treatment of imagery. This is a rich moment in my studio practice; experimentation abounds, but I perceive a distinct thread of visual information rolling out in front of me. The invented worlds within my work are now dealing in time, space, and sound in a way that I did not know was possible, but they are still operating out of my native tongue, painting. |
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Elizabeth Knowles
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Artist Statement:
Natural patterns inspire my work. Some are biological patterns on the cellular level of organisms. Others are geological patterns of the earth's natural landscapes. Through painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation, I explore how dynamic patterns connect landscapes and life forms, physiology and physics, death and detritus, growth and form. Starting with the most simple and building to the more complex, my creative process becomes a recreation of the interaction of different levels of life. One basic component connects with another and another and another until a whole is created. This action is similar to a cell grouping together with other cells to form a more intricate organism. Echoing fractal patterns, the work displays the unfolding of life as patterns expand back into each and into themselves. Additionally, the structures reveal a frozen moment in time depicting the transition between order and chaos or life and death. Fractal structures define life's patterns both figuratively and metaphorically. The meandering journey of sperm to egg, a chain of DNA, the lines on the palm of a hand, the more symbolic branches of a family tree or the recursive structures of language and thought interpret our lives as a series of non-linear transformations of organic structures unfolding in space. Ranging from the atomistic to larger organizational systems, the study of patterns reveals the complex interface between the various levels of life and the mysterious connection between them. |
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Barbara Marks
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Artist Statement:
Painting . . . and drawing. I make small-scale, square, colorful paintings. My imagery is rooted in observation, and it departs from it. I like to call attention to the commonplace and the local. There’s the external world—and then there’s me. My paintings are the intersection of the two. In that respect, they are intimate and personal; perhaps they’re narrative. I choose to paint ordinary situations and particular places by manipulating color, shape, and composition in such a way that the possibility of multiple interpretations engages a viewer and invites closer investigation. The way I paint is driven by my interest in abstraction as economy of expression, and by my fascination with the dual role that color can play both as content and as structure in a painting. I use color to create space. I make paintings—but drawing is my habit. I draw every day, any place, and everywhere. I draw mostly with an extra-superfine black Indian ink pen, and sometimes with colored ink, in accordion-fold albums. Each album contains one continuous sheet of drawing paper, 8.25 inches high x 123 inches long, folded into a hardbound cover. I’ve filled 150+ albums with drawings. Lately, though, I’ve been drawing on the insides of collapsed and unfolded packaging—formerly containing such ordinary items as bar soap, chocolate, tissues, crackers, advil, et cetera—upcycling something meant to be disposed of, by reëmploying it as the substrate for a drawing. My drawings relate to my paintings and vice versa. Behind every painting is a drawing. |
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Mark Römisch
Artist Statement:
In contemporary German theater, the focus often forgoes a faithful representation of the original text in favor of a deeper investigation of fundamental themes. The human condition remains at the core of these productions, even in its absence on stage. As an artist, whose background is intertwined in theatre, I follow this approach in my photography. My interest is to discover and explore facets beyond the obvious storyline given through the content of the motifs. Oscillating between conceptual and documentary approaches, my work often raises questions about the role of human existence in society. Abstract imagery is repeatedly interlinked with addressing social or political issues. Though ultimately offering a possibility of hope, a sense of (not) belonging and loss is a theme throughout my work and echoes my upbringing as a member of the second post-war generation in Germany. The Japanese concept of Ma also plays an important role in my formal language. Ma can be roughly translated as the negative space in a composition, although it is not “negative” per se; it is described as an emptiness full of possibilities or a pause. The aesthetics of emptiness and philosophical importance of reduction helps guide the attention of viewers. In the series How to disappear completely, the notion of disappearance implies the end of a visual existence. Inevitably, the question of before and after the point of vanishing is raised. Who disappeared? Where are they now? An intention is suggested, yet stays as ambiguous as its cause. As much as it can evoke feelings of fear and emptiness, at the same time, disappearance implies the existence of hope – for return and for an improvement of the condition. |
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Mark Williams
Artist Statement:
My current work is based on cave interiors, especially the formations of flowstones, stalactites, and stalagmites. The earliest known drawings over 30,000 years old are found in caves. Humans have been drawn to these chambers for a very long time, and I am no exception. During the past seventeen years, I have visited more than 80 caves and photographed the settings. The artwork is inspired by these images. Nostalgia is often referenced in the use of decades old fabrics for the base of paintings. This reference to the past is then partially hidden by layers of screen printed and hand painted images. The layering suggests the passage of time and accumulated memories. Repeated imagery becomes a rhythmic pattern that suggests that one is looking at something that is part of a larger, unseen whole. My artwork alludes to the fact that we are all part of a larger realm measured in geologic time. |