" Days" by Jeroen Witvliet at The Slide Room Gallery

Recently I have focused on debris piles and their ambiguous origins.

The piles are recognized to be accumulations of a history that might still be visible or might be obscured. The situation that led to the formation of the pile has become an enigma. If anything they have become an abstraction. In the forms and shapes landscapes can be discovered, the remnants of events and situations become landscape. Faint echoes of shelters, ribs, pallets, trees all create a sense of the presence of a raft. A raft lost at sea.

Images collected of a wide range of piles are being used as a starting point for the paintings and drawings. Information is being added or removed. Barricades erected in the streets become in disguisable from construction site materials left after the building of houses. Humans are removed from the scenes to further strengthen the removal from direct reference. All drawings and paintings are now done from memory.

I seem to always question the position of a perceived fixed point in time. Quickly realizing that information is constantly being reinterpreted and new meaning and readings can be attached to both the personal, a historical event and a work of art.

I have been intrigued by the way piles, statues and memorial sites are a result and expression of a time bound, subjective interpretation of history.

Temporary events are constantly related to and measured against previous situations, history and art history.  Events, especially current, seem the last hooray of an incubation period. Or at least that is the feeling I get. Images of barricades thrown up in the street seem to talk about the tensions that grew under the surface, accumulating in a reaction.

The rise and fall of political systems might be seen as mirroring the growth seasons.

While working on ideas in a studio, the creative process seems to be responsive to the world and informed by a similar incubation period.

When painting and drawing greenhouses I am creating sheltered situations. These are structures that protect and nourish seedlings. My approach is one of lyricism, using the structures as symbols. In them I create situations that are sometimes poetic, sometimes unbelievable. I am giving myself the freedom to manipulate what grows inside of them to the extend that I feel is necessary to make a drawing or painting that questions more then it answers.

Exhibit runs until Aug. 31, 2012 

Slide Room Gallery 

2549 Quadra St. Victoria, B.C.
Phone: 250-380-3500