Voyage en Zigzag at Bau-xi GalleryIn Val Nelson’s exhibition of new paintings, Voyage en Zigzag, opening November 7 at Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto, her unabashedly seductive oil on wood pieces range from images of European palace museums to mural-like ambiguous spaces that conjure notions of memory and desire. The Vancouver-based painter has assembled (and in some cases, re-mixed) favorite travel snapshots sent to her by friends and acquaintances over the internet, and mined her own travel photo archive to create paintings that playfully reference theatrical and filmic conventions of space, light, and temporal transition, at times employing painterly gestures that mimic the graphics of Googlemaps’ streetview. The large multi-panel painting Conversation1_Dorosz is based on Canadian artist friend Chris Dorosz’s parents’ living room. “He lives in San Francisco now, and I read this piece as a kind of nostalgia for a lost time,” says Nelson, “The paintings that came after this one kind of build on his way of seeing the world, so in a sense many of these works are a collaborative effort.” Another piece is from photos taken by a Russian quantum physicist. “I love the concept of downloading pixels from his camera to my computer, then transforming them into paint. When you think about it, a painting is a kind of virtual reality.” A 2003 semi-finalist in the Royal Bank painting competition, Nelson was recently recognized by inclusion in Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting, a survey book on the state of painting in Canada. Her work is in public collections such as the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and numerous private collections in Canada, the US, the UK, and Dubai. Nelson’s paintings can be equated to a film or stage set where the viewer plays out his or her fantasies. Her depictions of tourist sites and travel locations address her continued interest in the elusive search for happiness. She is intrigued by the symbols of travel — the sites we visit, the ways we get there and the objects we carry with us. Her application of control and chance in her process mirrors both the planned and unpredictable paths of the traveler. The opening reception on November 7 takes place 2 to 4 pm, with an artist talk at 3pm. Bau-Xi Gallery Artist Reception: November 7, 2-4 pm Bau-Xi Gallery |