For immediate release: April 7, 2010

Monica Tap
Here and also elsewhere
New paintings
April 10 – May 1, 2010

Opening: Saturday, April 10
Artist present 2-5pm

Between winter and summer, 2010, 60 x 80 inches, oil on canvas

We are pleased to present Here and also elsewhere, an exhibition of new paintings by Monica Tap

Monica Tap has based her paintings of the last few years upon stills extracted from low-resolution video, captured using the video feature on her digital still camera. Her paintings are rooted in her experience as a commuter watching the landscape whip by through the windows of buses, cars and trains. Brushstrokes trace and amplify the pixels of the still, giving the impression that the paint is pulled across the canvas by sheer speed. For this new body of work Tap has added the ephemeral changes of the seasons to her investigations of the fleeting moments of time and light.

Tap’s work has been exhibited widely at both private and public galleries including the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (On), The MacLaren Art Centre ( Barrie , On) and, most recently, the Rodman Hall Gallery (St. Catherine’s, On). In his essay for the exhibition Unnatural, at Rodman Hall, writer and painter Pete Smith observed:

”There is also a noticeable increase in the overall wattage of her palettes luminosity. In her most recent paintings, however, these earlier structural motifs become more internalized and a true embarrassment of brushwork, opacities and colour daubs radiates from the confines of their large-scale frames. Between Winter and Summer (2009), is one such piece. A bright, turp-thinned, under-painted orange bleeds though the slim trees that cross the paintings middle left side. The olive and umber and sap and beige of tree and leaf and rock and sky are back lit by this uncanny glow. Thick, triangular shards of paint punctuate the surface with a gooey, shiny viscosity that breaks this paintings spell of loose verisimilitude. This is the glare of the window: the glare of the screen.”

He goes on to remark that, “The rugged Canadian landscape that once seemed so eternal to the Group of Seven and their horde seems, in Taps paintings, to be something that is fleeting and ephemeral: something in danger of vanishing. These are not only landscapes that are passing from our vision; they are landscapes that are passing from our experience.”

Pete Smith also reviewed the last exhibition at Wynick/Tuck Gallery for Canadian Art Magazine, spring, 2008 noting’ “Since the early 20^th century, painters have called on an abundance of styles, movements and ideologies in order to wrestle with the daunting task of imparting to the static painted image a modern sense of mobility. In her recent work, Monica Tap dusts off this venerable challenge and gives it a contemporary and novel spin: can the language of video, in this case low-resolution digital video, be translated into the language of painting? Tap presents several intriguing and handsome answers.”

“Can Painting deal with time based media?”, Gary Michael Dault asks in his review of Tap’s exhibition at Wynick/Tuck Gallery in May 2005, “--- And Tap’s attempts to explore it are admirable. In the best of these time-based, film-based landscapes, you get a rush and tumble of things, the feeling of time before and time after.”

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Please note: on Saturdays, free parking for building visitors is available in the 401 Richmond building lot, located at the rear of the building. Enter off Richmond St. , at the east end of the building. The building and gallery can be accessed from the back entrance, off the parking lot. There is also parking available in several lots off Peter St. and on the north side of Richmond St , across from the building.