Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents: Gillian King

Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents:
Gillian King
THIS IS JUST A SEASON
October 3 - 15
Vernissage: Thursday, October 3, 5:00 - 8:00PM

King Artist Statement - Written by Ash Barbu

With each passing night, through the poetics of perception, we cannot speak of a single moon but only many moons. And yet, for science and rationality, the singularity of its rock mass persists. The paradox of the moon lies in the distance between what is felt and found, between sight and touch. It hangs before and covers itself in distant air—it is recessed and protrudes, at once opaque and tangible. With the new series This is Just a Season, Gillian King pursues these relations with paintings that call into question the distances within and outside of ourselves. King examines entangled foregrounds and backgrounds, creating intricately layered spatial tensions that collapse linear perspective and reveal forms of affective mapping. The works both gather from and recast histories of modernist painting that stress aesthetic principles of flatness, opticality, and absorption. King constructs infused visual scenes coupled with haptic qualities that challenge the two-dimensionality of the
canvas. She proposes a mode of abstraction where intimate curiosities of sight and touch speak to an overlapping open-endedness of flesh, memory, and metaphor.

For King, this dialogue is born from interventions at the level of artistic process. Across the multiple stages of their creation, canvases are bundled, washed, dried, cut, recycled, sewn and stuffed. Simultaneously, King employs techniques like natural dyeing, rust dyeing, shibori, and paint washes, which seep, stain, and spray across fibers. Working together, surface and surplus push and pull the viewer into unknowable projections of space. Through this play of indistinguishable surfaces, marks, and images, King’s abstraction reflects bodies and weather patterns in perpetual states of change. Those earlier conventions of purity and visual singularity in abstraction are surpassed as the artist reaches towards themes of motherhood, environment, and feminist world-making. Here, the canvas, the physical space of painting, is not simply a blank, unmediated, measurable mass from which to insert oneself. Instead, distant presences coexist and embed into one another, bearing the traces of
different lives.

King Biography

Gillian King is a Visual Artist (MFA), Art Therapist (DTATI), Psychotherapist, and Art Educator from Treaty One Territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Gillian holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2016) and is the winner of the 2019 Espronceda Centre for the Arts and Culture Artistic Prize (Barcelona, Spain), the 2017 RBC Emerging Artist Award, and the2017 Nancy Petry Award (http://www.joeplaskett.com/award-recipients/2017-plaskett-and-petry-awardrecipients/utm_source=GSTL++%5BExhibition+Invitiation%5D&utm_campaign=071b3a02cd-Evite_Oomen_November_2017_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adbbcf6608-071b3a02cd-410451673) . Gillian has shown in galleries and participated in residencies nationally and internationally. Her work has been featured in Border Crossings Magazine, Canadian Art Magazine, Create! Magazine, and CBC Gem.

Galerie St-Laurent + Hill
293 Dalhousie Street
Ottawa, Canada
K1N 7E5