Paper Trail: Environments

Melissa Cormier, Laura Demers, Julia Martin & Jim Reid 

January 12 – February 22, 2019

Join us for the Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12, from 2 – 5pm

Discover a compelling selection of contemporary works on paper by Melissa Cormier, Laura Demers, Julia Martin, and Jim Reid. Showcasing drawing, painting, screen-printing, and photography, this exhibition draws inspiration from the landscape. Natural forms and phenomena become a catalyst for deeper artistic explorations and responses that consider the impact of human mediation on the environment.

Jim Reid‘s expressive watercolour sketches ofthe North West Territories push the Western legacy of landscape painting beyondthe idyllic and pastoral. He creates conspicuous visual tension through bold gestural lines over soft washes of watercolour. Painted plien-air, Reid taps into the life force and energy of the Northern landscape, to reveal the terrain as ancient, complex and constantly transforming. Julia Martin‘s text-based photographs juxtapose autobiographical prose with black and white images of forests and fields to capture different internal physiological experiences of place. Her narrative intervention is not intended to describe the photographs, rather to expand on their potential readings. Martin’s deliberate infusion of witticisms and imagination into her prose allows the viewer to draw their own interpretations.

Melissa Cormier‘s intricate graphite drawings inspired by organic motifs and textures create surrealist compositions that intentionally reference the body. Cormier explores different textures from natural specimens: both flora and fauna. Rendered with fine precision and detail, her graphite drawings materialize on the page like a lucid dream. Laura Demers‘s new series of screen prints explore formal and conceptual connections between natural ecosystems and built environments. Abstracted paper models inspired by architectural drawings, and clay renderings of seashells are the starting point for Demers’s studies. She deconstructs and arranges these objects, like natural specimens, to visually map reoccurring patterns found both in shells and in architectural forms. What emerge are organic, circuitous, almost whimsical forms, which become blue prints for conceiving of the ways we shelter ourselves.