THE CANVAS, OCAD University, Toronto

FOCUS: SUPERPLASTIC

At OCAD, expansive thinking has embraced the community. Superplastic, an exhibition of four painters, reflects this shifting attitude – where dissolving disciplinary boundaries have resulted in students and faculty exchanging ideas and looking outward in the advancement of cultural understanding. With this exhibition, I wanted to reveal an existing dialogue between artists that has grown out of a time of change in OCAD’s long history.

Amanda Reeves and Jay Gazley are former students of Vladimir Spicanovic and mine at OCAD. From the beginning, our conversations always revealed a belief in painting as a platform for worldly investigation and an understanding of painting as a model for contemporary experience. Amanda Reeves and Jay Gazley graduated from OCAD in 2005. Their practices engage deep areas of study and combine with painstakingly slow painterly processes. Amanda Reeves has a previous degree in Marine Biology from UBC. A scientific method is exposed in her painting as the study of the perception and colour is expressed in subtle yet eye-dazzling paintings of hand-rendered dots on soft fields of colour. On the development of her work Amanda says, “Invertebrate creatures are visually stunning moving through water. My discovery of systems of patterns as they relate to the physiology and morphology of these seemingly simple but incredibly complex organisms is a major influence. Additionally, with a scientific background I tend to have an analytical approach...”

Where Amanda is tying previous research into her work, Jay Gazley is expanding upon his realm of study while completing an MAA at Emily Carr Institute. His chromatically arresting, geometric paintings imply shifting views of cityscapes that visually question the systems required to run our complex, urban environments. About his most recent body of work Jay states, “These paintings examine the various ways in which humanity constructs artificial systems and how we theorize about those constructs. Whether it is through utopian architectural design or science fiction movies, we are revealed and studied within the context of our collective technological fabrications and synthetic landscapes”.

Vlad Spicanovic, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Art, is known for his critical discussions with students. In his own painting he works with memory using a painterly, filmic format. Narratives are layered and sequenced in long picture formats that weave colour, surface and form into visually dynamic abstractions. Vlad and I share a similar point of view – we’re invested in the materiality of painting as a visual solution for the working through of ideas. I’m reminded of a prolonged discussion in thesis between Vlad, Amanda and myself, where we considered the impact and implications of particular shades of red in Amanda’s paintings. The optical effects of red upon the viewer were much debated and resulted in Amanda’s graduating project for 4th-year thesis. In the Superplastic exhibition, I too have included a rather intense red painting that embodies my interests in the perceptual impact of colour as expressed through our designed environments. My blurred abstractions evolve from Modernist colour-field painting and allude to such disparate sources as microbiology and interior environments.

In the Drawing and Painting department at OCAD, this dialogue is one of many fruitful debates. It speaks of the need on the part of students and faculty to integrate their experiences and interests into an ever-evolving painting practice. As evidenced by the department’s large enrollment the interest in painting remains. In a fast-paced, technological world there are still people who want to respond with the mind and the hand.

– Anda Kubis, OCAD Faculty of Art Professor, writer and Curator.