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Gathering Fictions 2022Gathering Fictions: A Dialogue on Painting- Janet Jones & Michel Daigneault In this two-person exhibition, each artist has a large exhibition space of their own that mirror one another in room size and dimensions. In a small room, in between these two large exhibition spaces, is where our ‘dialogue’ is initiated with several small works by each artist ‘facing’ each other. The following exhibition statement by the Exhibition Curator, Anik Glaude, is on the back wall: Janet Jones and Michel Daigneault are contemporary painters who question and challenge our understanding of abstraction. Aware of and informed by historical and formal definitions of the genre, they see abstraction as moving beyond specific movements to convey broader meaning today. Both artists look to abstraction as a way to explore different realities, or as modes of perceiving what is true and is what is not. Both employ similar methods– layering, patterning, and collage– to assemble their narratives from a diversity of sources. The resulting paintings, however, differ significantly in scale, imagery and intent. Established artists and peers, Jones and Daigneault intentionally cultivate a collegial relationship that thrives on debate, on creating space for dialogue that permits both different ideas and approaches to art making to flourish. Curated by Anik Glaude Gathering Fictions Janet Jones
In this exhibition, I see Gathering Fictions as the recalling of past ‘stories’, how we remember our histories. In my recent paintings, and hand-tinted, analogue photograms, I am interested in re-envisioning notions of utopia within a contemporary urban context. My focus on the tradition of modernist abstract geometric painters, in particular woman painters such as Sonia Delaunay & Anni Albers, but including the Russian Constructivists and Moholy-Nagy, and their utopian visions of the world, is evident. An extended research trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg Russia and across Siberia via the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1992, a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a subsequent visit to the Bauhaus in Weimer, Germany, and a trip across middle America at the apex of the economic collapse in 2009, all sites of very different utopian ‘dreams’, began my reflections. Marshall McLuhan wrote that artists are the distant early warning systems of their time. In these works, I question how & why utopian dreams have turned dystopian & how we can ‘dream again’ but in new ways. |
