Janice Gurney: Translations & Alliances

Rene Van Halm: Depth of Field

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 27, 6 - 9pm

Exhibitions Run: November 27, 2014 - January 10, 2015

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Janice Gurney: Translations & Alliances

Translations & Alliances is an open-ended body of work, currently numbering 35 separate pieces, based on English translations of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. At present there are sixteen different translations, the first published in 1634 and the most recent in 2006. From 2006 to 2013 Gurney made paintings from each translation of the same meditation: Book 10.17.

My understanding of this meditation is fleeting. As a response to this sensation of instability, I dropped out the words of the meditation, leaving only red punctuation marks floating on a dark blue ground. The text becomes invisiblewhat remains is a structure provided by punctuation alone. These symbols of our breath reveal how the expression of our thoughts has changed over the centuries, and the shift in meaning that takes place in our bodies.

Rene Van Halm: Depth of Field

Depth of Field, the title of Rene Van Halms most recent body of work, is a photographic term used to describe the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear sharp in an image. Van Halm works with a range of dislocated backgrounds, removed from their original contexts and represented either in or out of focus, upsetting the accepted hierarchy of foreground to background.

Van Halm culls disembodied bits of backgrounds from dcor and fashion magazines and replaces the large resultant voids with expanses of pure colour that mimic the hues of origami paper. These background fragments combined in irregular geometries - curves and angles - build a tension between figuration and abstraction, disrupting conventional figure/ground, subject/object relationships. The resultant paintings represent a subtle shift, a translation, from the printed images and the bodies of colour, to marks and fields rendered in paint.