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16/3/2004

Tracking

Art Gallery Bishop, Lennoxville, QC

Thirty year in Canada, Thirty year in Trinidad

Curator: Gaëtane Verna

This two part exhibition project and its accompanying catalogue (January 2005) is produced in collaboration with Mount St-Vincent University Art Gallery of Halifax. Denyse Thomasos will create in each gallery a site-specific wall painting installation that will explore ideas of history and identity.

In Tracking: Thirty year in Canada, Thirty year in Trinidad, through her seemingly formal abstract painting — She is known for a boldly spatialized style of abstract painting, whose imagery is often carceral or cage-like — Thomasos will articulates her poetic responses to her family's experience of displacement. Trinidadian-born, she immigrated to Canada in her youth and now lives and works in New York. Though some critics have assumed that her work quotes Modernist abstraction, Thomasos insists on the referential content of her iconography, in part reclaiming motifs from African visual culture that both predate and continue alongside Western Modernism.

Denyse Thomasos uses social cartography to explore past personal history for clarification of the present. This exhibition will continue an investigation of floor maps of houses of the artist's extended family that lived in Trinidad before immigrating to Canada. The wall painting will uses the floor plans of the Trinidadian houses once lived in by her extended family as a point of departure to further explore the ideas of history and identity. Thomasos asked her family and friends to complete floor maps of the homes they left in Trinidad and photograph them. Many of her relatives have now lived in Canada for as many years or in some cases even longer, than they lived in Trinidad. Thomasos is reaching deep into her cultural roots to extract meaning, intertwining the past and the present.

In recent years, wall painting has developed into a unique richly varied practice, moving beyond conceptual and text based interactions into a more abstract or representational dimension. Thomasos work combines aspects of architectural blueprints and abstract painting to create her large-scale compositions. By painting directly onto the walls, Thomasos' new work expands the geometric form into representations of three-dimensional space. The viewer has the impression of actually entering the painting, thus experiencing physical proximity to the work and in turn producing a different form of intimacy.

Thomasos' project will present works that are site-specific and ephemeral, the image of her work never to be repeated as the paintings are to be erased at the close of the exhibition. Don't' miss it!

Denyse Thomasos lives and works in New York City. In 1989, she obtained her MFA from Yale University. A recipient in 1997 of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1999 Canada Council Millennium Grant, She teaches in the Visual Art Department of Rutgers University, NJ, and frequently travels to Canada to exhibit in Toronto. She has also completed residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Bellagio Centre, Rockefeller Foundation, Italy. She is represented in Canada by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.

The Art Gallery of Bishop's University would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, and Simplex Equipment Rental of Sherbrooke for their generous financial contribution in the production this exhibition.

Opening reception: Wednesday March 17th from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Denyse Thomasos will be available for interviews from March 15 to 17, 2004

special opening reception activities:
- Informal guided tour of the exhibition: Join us before the opening reception Wednesday 17th of March from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. for a talk by Denyse Thomasos.
- Spoken Word performances: Coco Café, a spoken word showcase hosted by Mahalia "Miss Thang" Verna and featuring performers Shani Carter and Jason Joseph.

Tracking: Thirty year in Canada, Thirty year in Trinidad :
from March 17 to April 24, 2004
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.,
and all evenings of performances at Centennial Theatre

- AGBU Cine-Club: Keep the River on Your Right, 1969
Titled after Tobias Schneebaum's cult classic memoir about his experiences of living in the Amazon.
Date: Wednesday March 24th, 2004 at 7 p.m.
Centennial Theatre Cost: $4/person
Original version in English

- MEET THE CURATOR
Visit the exhibition Tracking: Thirty Years in Canada, Thirty Years in Trinidad with Curator Gaëtane Verna and one of the four assistants who worked with Denyse Thomasos, on her site-specific piece as they answer questions regarding the creative process of such a work.
Date: Monday, March 29, 2004 at 7:00 p.m.
Meeting Place: AGBU
Free Admission
In French

Source: Dominique Godfrey
T. (819) 822-9600, ext. 2279
F. (819) 822-9703

Art gallery of Bishop's University
Rue College Street, Lennoxville, Qc, J1M 1Z7
(819) 822-9600 ext: 2279

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