New Land Paintings
In its title, Stephanie Aitken's exhibition New Land Paintings references John Cage's New River Watercolors, produced largely through chance operations: a lacunae of classical representation. With her new series, Aitken seeks to "configure paintings that entice yet forbid entry, furthuring the natural function of pictorial push and pull" operating in the medium. Disavowing fidelity to any specific source imagery, Aitken re-remembers the bogs and clear cuts, the conventionally scenic as well as the burned and degraded zones of the BC Coastal landscape through a "felt-sense" of place. Though they are a dense accretion of memory, ambiguity and abstraction, Aitken has named these paintings for specific locales. Compelled in part by the native art inspired mid-century pseudo abstraction of Jack Shadbolt and Margaret Peterson -- and the use of "compositional devices" to create a quality of resistance -- Aitken's landscapes possess a density of surface residing within a kind of symbolist certainty.
Opening Friday, March 11, 7pm
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