Sarah Cale
January 15, 2011 — February 19, 2011
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Sarah Cale Mask, 2010, acrylic on board, 48 x 72" | ||
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Sarah Cale Untitled, 2010
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Opening reception: Saturday, January 15, 2011, 3 - 6pm
Artist in attendance
Sarah Cale received her BFA from The Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. She was a semi-finalist in 2009 and a finalist in the 2010 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Sarah Cale’s recent work is presented in her first solo exhibition at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.
Cale will show new paintings, drawings and collages. The interaction between these highlights the processes she uses, including her unique approach to the brushed gesture. In fact, in her work the application of colour to a wood panel ground is “second-hand”: Cale applies acrylic paint to a plastic surface, peels off the dry brushstrokes and then applies them to the panel. The result is a trompe l’oeil effect wherein the viewer presupposes the direct application of paint through a spontaneous gesture of the artist’s hand, as in traditional expressionist works. However, Cale’s works capture the moment of expressive gesture while casting the painterly process into a more complex set of relations between paint and the surface it is applied to. Using the grain of the wood background, which at times resembles the pattern of brushstrokes, she creates a dynamic relationship between surface and ground. These formal questions – surface and ground, the material quality of paint and the signature gesture of the artist have long been the focus of modernist painting. Cale takes these fundamental precepts of painting and brings them to the fore in fresh ways. Vivid colour dances across a warm and richly nuanced surface to produce some of the most compelling new abstract painting being made in Canada today.
Artists:
Sarah Cale