This will be the conclusion to my Gathered Gallery digital residency and for this final post I thought it fitting to write about the exhibition I had been working towards during the duration of the residency program.
How do we discern memory from fact? How can we translate the past without obscuring the truth? These questions have always been at the forefront of my practice and they lead me to develop the series and exhibtion, Certainty of Tides with Jones Gallery in Saint John, NB.
My interest in memory based or experience based painting began nearly 10 years ago as an act of preservation. Deeply concerned with the volatile and elusive quality of memory I had hoped to record my life in a way that reflected the true experience – an impossible undertaking. Digging deep into my past, the earliest of these paintings told stories of my childhood – fishing trips with my father, beach fires at the cabin and evenings spent playing in the backyard - fond memories of my upbringing in Newfoundland. However, with the passage of time, details are lost, people forgotten and we are left to fill in the blanks.
left Image: Almost Home, acrylic, pastel and graphite on panel, 48" x 48"
In deciphering facts and feelings my painterly descriptions of the ‘truth’, as I described in previous posts, become a blend of reality and idealism. The experience becomes dislocated, but what remains constant is the seemingly never changing landscape.
Certainty of Tides presents a collection of work that was created out of acceptance - acceptance that our memories are not permanent. These mindscapes are a way of working through my feelings about forgetting and a way of finding peace in the irretrievable.
Certainty of Tides runs until May 2 at Jones Gallery. The exhibition can be viewed on their website - https://www.jonesgallery.ca/current .
* Installation images courtesy of Caleb Jones at Jones Gallery *
right image: Summer Swimmers, acrylic, pastel and graphite on panel, 48" x 48"
I'd like to give a sincere thank you to Emily Pittman and Natalie Field for this opportunity and giving me the space to think and write about my work. It has been an enriching experience.
