For Immediate Release: November 25, 2011

Transitional Movement
New and Recent Works

Jessica Groome
Colette Laliberté
Dyan Marie
Martin Pearce
Mark Stebbins
Monica Tap
Carol Wainio

November 26 – December 17
Opening Reception:
Saturday November 26, Artist present 2-5pm


The exhibition and title, Transitional Movement, was developed in response to the new work of several artists and their recent and future travels and artists residencies in Canada and abroad. As is often the case the working title suggested several interpretations, transitions in time, space, light and movement, and the show expanded to include seven artists.

Jessica Groome, Two things happened at once together 2, 2011, 47 X 53 ½, oil on board

Jessica Groome will be represented by several new paintings. Groome’s transition to her Toronto studio will be followed in the New Year with her move to two residencies, the first in Berlin for two months followed by six months in Sweden. The residencies have been made possible by the Joseph Plaskett award.

In a quote from a recent artists statement Groome says; “---I remain surprised and captivated by paint as a material and colour as an entity, because everything is approximate, based on experience, practice and results. The spatial and sensory focus I achieve through colour is as shifting as the conditions in my studio environment.”

Colette Laliberté, Moments 2011, 40 X 50 ½ inches, archival ink/somerset velvet paper

Colette Laliberté, in the process of developing a new body of work for her next exhibition in the fall of 2012, produced a series of major digital prints during her residency at the Banff Centre.

In a statement about her new work Laliberté says: “In March 2011 while in residency at the Banff Artist Centre where I worked on programming a new animation, I used the Banff Centre’s archival printing facilities. In 56 x 44 inch format, I printed a series of colour digital prints generated from the animation.--- The quadrilateral shapes stopped in their movement, suggest different readings on the notion of time — time as duration, transition and space.” We will be including several of the new prints in this exhibition.

Dyan Marie, waterfallhead, 2010 photo-based, performance animation, 15 inch lightbox

Dyan Marie, will be represented in the exhibition by her recent Transmission series of work, including several wall mounted animations.

Marie says of her work. “I attempt to mix a sense of fate with an evolutionary will to struggle, evolve, and regenerate. ---The response to this confluence of content is to let things flow in and out, like air moving through lungs. In the process, the work makes the unseen visible by giving it representational shape.” Animated light-boxes create additional image platforms for the socially engaged and sometimes comic images.

Martin Pearce, Electricity & Lead, 2010, 72 X 54 inches oil and grease pencil on canvas

Following Martin Pearce’s last exhibition several of his new works travelled to public galleries in Canada. We are pleased to have just received the paintings back in the gallery and include several in this exhibition. Pearce’s paintings are realized slowly, with many marks and erasures. The following is a quote from Liz Wylie’s essay for the catalogue for the exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery:
“Pearce is able to wrest quite a wallop of impact from his modest and reduced means. He is able to achieve the finest and richest surfaces, and at the same time, implies a subtle, fluctuating spatial depth as well. ----Each work has its own unique emotional tenor and tone ------------the paintings exist in a zone in which abstraction and representation strangely co-exist. Ultimately, one must simply let oneself go in front of these works, and enter into them, as into worlds, tracking, as our eye explores, the measure and pitch of our inner responses.”

Mark Stebbins, Palette Shift, 2011, 16 X 12 inches, acrylic and ink on board

We have invited Toronto based artist Mark Stebbins to participate in the exhibition. Stebbins was awarded an Honourable Mention in the 2010 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and was part of the national exhibition tour of RBC semi-finalists. A major painting was recently purchased by the Canada Council Art Bank and he will be included in a three person exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, curated by Linda Jansma, for the fall of 2013.
Stebbins summarizes his work in his statement as follow: “While my work shares the labour-intensity of many traditional crafts, it is distanced from them through the act of representation: knitting, stitching, weaving and embroidery have been translated into the languages of painting and drawing. At the same time, the work refuses to be read as straight painting: paint strokes outlined in ink have become caricatures of gesture, fractured picture elements. Similarly, while the pixel mosaics and glitches of electronic imagery are evoked throughout, the work’s connection to digital processes is by metaphor alone. Just as one’s gaze is denied a place to rest within these densely packed images, the elements of these compositions similarly refuse to sit still. These are pictures in flux, caught in the moments of transition.

Monica Tap, In the Shadows I, 2011, oil on canvas, 40” x 60”

Monica Tap is currently working towards her solo exhibition at WTG in April, 2012. As a preview to the spring exhibition we are including two new paintings. Tap continues to work with same conceptual approach using video stills as her subject. Tap comments on these paintings: “There, the abstraction was more pronounced as the camera was able to capture hardly anything at all. That left more room for invention and play with non-referential colour. They are, like the other works, derived from video stills, only this time, at dusk, and consequently in a very low light situation.

“Can Painting deal with time based media? Gary Michael Dault asks in his review of a recent Tap exhibition at Wynick/Tuck Gallery. “--- 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.

Carol Wainio, Old World, 2011, 54 X 86 inches, acrylic on canvas

Carol Wainio will be represented by three small paintings from her new body of work currently underway in her studio. They will be installed alongside recent paintings from her last exhibition.

Wainio says of her work: “Focusing on the kind of transformation expressed historically through fairy tale, and more recently through “development”, acquisition, and. mediation, the work explores the role that painting may still play in opening up a discursive space around history, material culture, narrative and storytelling, the idea of the copy, globalization, and historical forms of representation, both “high art” and vernacular.”

Diana Nemiroff, Director of the Carelton University Art Gallery and curator for the Wainio exhibition, The Book, wrote in her introduction for the catalogue a fitting comment that also applies to the new work : “ ------ And as paintings, they are emphatically constructed, drawing attention to the shaping and delineating character of painting and line, and shifting with ease between one spatial register and another, as well as between representational styles, each with its social, historical, and artistic connotations”.