SKETCH: OCAD University Magazine

Painting to Explore Experience

At Superplastic last October, two OCAD graduates and their former instructors shared with Drabinsky Gallery visitors an artistic dialogue on how painting can be used as a starting point to explore contemporary experience.

The group exhibition featured the abstract paintings of Amanda Reeves and Jay Gazley (both Drawing & Painting, ’05) and OCAD instructors Anda Kubis (Professor, Faculty of Art) and Vladimir Spicanovic (Associate Dean, Faculty of Art).

According to Kubis, who also curated the show, all four Superplastic artists use the painting process “as a means of resolving disparate interests in biology, industrial design, architecture, urban planning and film within the tradition of painting.”

Reeves, who has a degree in marine biology from the University of British Columbia, employs a scientific method in her practice to explore perception. “I want to get the viewers physiologically involved, to engage them with the work, so that they become aware of their optical experience.” She structures her painting process by controlling selected variables — for example, using a square format, working with circles and utilizing only pure chromos layers to cover other colours. “I set parameters that are nonflexible and that respond to what develops intuitively by not having the positioning and the colour predetermined.”

For Gazley, currently completing his MAA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, painting is a medium for exploring urban systems and architecture. His paintings in Superplastic examine Modernist notions of utopian city planning. “The works were extremely tight, very systematic and extremely clean because I wanted to take that utopia to such a plastic state that its perfection became an eerie distopia.” He sees a strong connection among the Superplastic artists. “We all use abstractions and the language of Modernism as a departure point and share a common interest in constructing something new out of that language, something not limited to the language of paint that refers to real-world phenomena.”

In Kubis’s work, the sense of play that she incorporates into her studio process allows for an engagement with high Modernist abstraction and facilitates a regenerative dialogue with Modernism’s purist vocabulary. For her, painting is a means of mediating and understanding her environment as it is framed in contemporary culture. “The challenge, as I see it, is to seek a resolution between painting’s historic context and its relevance today as a means of explaining the dominant drivers of today’s visual landscape: architecture, design, advertising and photography.”

Spicanovic’s blurred abstractions, which developed from Modernist colour-field painting, allude to microbiology and interior environments. His creative practice includes painting, curating and art writing, as well as sound and film explorations. “My work in Superplastic is an extension of the Painted Cinema [volume 1 of 6] that was showcased in my solo exhibition this summer at Birch Libralato. In my work, I question the proximity between fantasy and actuality while reconfiguring our consciousness of the images and the sensory experience of painting.”

Superplastic, says Spicanovic, provided “a wonderful opportunity to reconnect, exchange ideas, and illuminate once again the vitality of contemporary painting practice in the OCAD community.”

Larissa Kostoff