Jessica Houston

Beyond Recall

2017

Messages in a Bottle Text by Cameron Skene “Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.” - Immanuel Kant A recent online story i...

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...

My painting practice began with subverting the idea of a still life to create an absurd experience where the presence of carefully observed and exaggerated absurd forms painted from ...

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...

Ryōan-ji is the Japanese Zen temple in Kyoto, a monastery that gave rise to the idea of ​​the purely abstract Zen garden that inspired this series Francisco Larios’ works are done by...

In this abstract oil painting, Dintino uses muddy colors to evoke images of garbage, swamps, and junk yards. The dirty green melds into the orange and creates a muddy orange, which then melds into a black, almost as if the colors were being infected. The painting almost reeks with the colors Dintino decided to use, as each one has its own aroma and pungency. Dintino's work has to do with the melding of title and piece. His paintings all illustrate his ideas and words through visuality and color. Creating large panoramic pieces makes his work atmospheric and immersive, allowing the viewer to literally feel the title of his painting. This is quite a synesthetic approach to making art and allows ideas and words to sing. Born in San Francisco, California in 1964, Patrick Dintino grew up in Sunnyvale, in the south bay area. He went to college in San Diego earning a BA degree in Industrial Arts from San Diego State University, and co-founded Artists in Motion art...

Dintino's work has to do with the melding of title and piece. His paintings all illustrate his ideas and words through visuality and color. Creating large panoramic pieces makes his work atmospheric and immersive, allowing the viewer to literally feel the title of his painting. This is quite a synesthetic approach to making art and allows ideas and words to sing. Born in San Francisco, California in 1964, Patrick Dintino grew up in Sunnyvale, in the south bay area. He went to college in San Diego earning a BA degree in Industrial Arts from San Diego State University, and co-founded Artists in Motion...

oil on panel b. 1985, Phoenix, AZ Jake Fischer, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, graduated with a Master of Fine Art from Arizona State University in Drawing and Painting. Whil...