Jessica Houston

Beyond Recall

2017

Christine Nobel’s paintings in Between the Notes share a faithfulness to a soft colour palette of sky blues, mauves, peaches, roses and whites, reminiscent of a pastel-coloured youth...

In Nobel's new works, overlapping shapes, rhythm and movement interact with grid systems to give both order and fluidity. The gridded images offer a sense of expansion towards or int...

I think of my paintings primarily as landscapes. Recently, these landscapes appear to be more manufactured than organic. At first glance the subjects seem to be monumental forms such...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper, a rusted stove—is juxtaposed with the soft glow of a yellow circle. This continues Houston’s ongoing use of colour to question the particulars of perception. Heritage of All, White with Greed and Iron, and The Spaces we Breath, Houston’s titles read like lines of a haiku. Composed as prose, they are also confrontational, mapping out the cultural and environmental impacts of the extraction of resources in the Arctic. We witness scenes of violent decay, and yet simply carry on, like Business As Usual. In What Nations Come and Go a pale purple oval nearly fills the frame, revealing only in the very far right a simple cabin in front of a rocky incline. A similar imposing cloud of colour, this time blue, dominates the landscape in Mapped, Claimed, and Evaluated. The north is just as much an idea as it is a place, and is one that looms large in the Canadian imagination. There are few better examples than Glenn Gould...

I think of my paintings primarily as landscapes. Recently, these landscapes appear to be more manufactured than organic. At first glance the subjects seem to be monumental forms such...

Shayne Dark is an Ontario-based contemporary visual artist who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally since he began his artistic career in the mid 1980’s. Taking a...

According to the artist, "everything in life inspires me, not quite with direct interpretation, but as I see and experience faces, words, gestures, colors and shapes – all of it – I ...

A painting on wood panel, 96x72". Known for his erratic and expressive abstract works, Daniel Diaz-Tai uses various mixed media including sumi ink and...

Size: 4ft x 8ft each panel Mixed Media: oil, saw dust and foam on wooden panel. Steven is now one of the top emerging artists in the U.S. His works are ground breaking, bold and imb...

THE OCCUPANT 2020 Paris, France A smaller work done in parallel to a complimentary piece ‘WOMBS, TOMBS, TOOLS,’ which portrays hand-painted serif typeset words ‘THE OCCUPANT.’ A ribbon of black along the base of the work hosts a line which reads: “The offices in the desert vending out futures -- if you had gotten a good one you too would want them all to know -- where our bodies have been.” The work is a commentary on the spaces we inhabit, and how they are all temporary. Paint is acrylic with the exception of the red elements, which are formed with oil paint. The painting is executed on two connected, reclaimed wood panels...

Cotswold Track II by Eleanor Woolley [2021] Cotswold Track II is an original oil painting on a deep edged wooden panel by artist Eleanor Woolley. A small scale landscape...

Artwork in old painting. Wood table Western progress and development, of which we are so proud, have brought us to this point. A society where hyper-individualism, loss of solidarit...