Feast For Your Eyes

Bob
Boyer was a nationally and internationally renowned Métis artist, art
historian, curator, and educator. Boyer’s work is characterised by a
strong formal presence, reflecting his awareness of contemporary trends in
western art, combined with Indigneous design work. He is best known for his
acclaimed series of paintings on blankets that he called blanket statements.

In Like the Last Snows of Winter, Boyer uses symbology and bilateral symmetry, a technique that he first introduced in his blanket series in the 1980s and carried through to his later works.

Renowned
textile artist Jane Kidd is best known for her fine, hand-woven wool tapestries
that explore humanity’s relationship to nature and the environment as mediated
through culture, science and technology.

Kidd
draws on a wide range of sources, including botanical drawing, images of cells,
and aerial and satellite photographs of land as she explores subjects like
genetically modified and engineered organisms, deforestation, and aerial views
of planted crops. Her technically rigorous work also emphasizes the beauty and
material skill of handmade objects.  

What do you think the hand and top symbolize in Jane Kidd’s departure, voyage, arrival?

Sarah
Maloney is a Nova Scotia based artist. Her use of media includes beadwork and
embroidery. Her oeuvre, which includes sculptural works, is unified through the
artist’s focus on the natural world. Maloney’s work encourages the viewer’s
understanding of their inherent connection to the Earth. 

Maloney’s Botanical Study: Two Figures is a work of embroidery produced in 2006 that makes a visual connection between human anatomy and plants.

The process of embroidery, in which stitches slowly and precisely build to create images, echoes the way in which both plant and human cells are structured.

Through Google’s high-resolution camera technology, each stitch is made visible to viewers around the world.

In
1989, Ron Martin wrote, “When Leonardo advises the artist that the spirit is
quickened to new inventions through studying a confusion of shapes, he may be
saying that by looking at abstract patterns or a confusion of shapes, we engage
in a process of active imagination that mediates the spirit of an unconscious
idea and that is how we become aware of things.” By focusing on the paint and
the process of applying it to a surface by whatever means he chooses, Martin
allows the unconscious to choose the path the paint will follow. 

Groping and Meditating on a Confusion of Shapes combines shades of black and grey in a spontaneous whipped-cream surface of marbled colour.

Jim
Reid is a Canadian artist who incorporates elements from nature in select
Canadian locations into his three-dimensional landscape works. "Landscape
#18" incorporates tree branches and twigs
covered in paint and applied via an impasto technique. This unique process
allows Reid to generate a consistent feeling of place in his work. His fusion
of man-made materials, like acrylic paint and natural materials such as tree
branches and twigs, both preserves his chosen locations and allows viewers to
experience the Canadian landscape in a novel way. More than a simple depiction
of a Canadian landscape, Reid’s work provides viewers a literal piece of that
landscape. 

Can you spot the branches incorporated in Landscape #18?

Jamaican-born,
Toronto-based Dionne Simpson is a conceptual artist who is best known for her
mixed media paintings that combine traditional and contemporary techniques. "The square is a reoccurring element in my work and is used as a symbol of growth, order and stability that has become the backdrop for Western living." 

Simpson manipulates the canvas substrate in various ways, using the traditional African folk technique of thread-pulling (removing threads from the canvas) to weave in new materials and pigment.

Carl
Stewart’s "Swoon
#4" provides
a quasi-tactile experience. Stewart is interested in how images on the internet
cannot—despite what they might promise—provide a tactile experience. By
transforming such images into a textile, however, he turns these images into
something that can offer a physical sensation.

The digitalization of this specific work by the Google Art Camera returns the image back to the digital world, further complexifying the viewer’s experience.