The Green Years

Katie Lyle

July 29 to August 27, 2011

Katie Lyle’s work stems from an interest in portraiture, the act of painting, archetypes and images of femininity. The impulse and process apparent in The Green Years echo a loose collection of external referents. Paint application and visual language are tied to notions of personal desire tempered with discord. Brash, clumsy brush strokes sit next to ordered painterly ones; delicate features top exaggerated collaged limbs. Through this dialogue between image and application, Lyle elicits an obscured familiarity—the composite figures anonymous yet known, intimate but ageless.

As with classical portraiture, Lyle’s paintings seduce the viewer through a kind of recognition, with the subject acting as surrogate for both viewer and artist. However, her translation of photographic sources into paint obscures the individuality of the subject in favour of layered cultural signifiers—hair, clothing, pose, ground. These paintings are concerned with the conflicted intimacy of imprecise recognition, and the uncomfortable but compelling terrain between knowing and not knowing.

In creating these paintings, Lyle corresponded with women in their twenties and interviewed female family members. The distinctly personal specificity of this research—of oral history and apocryphal experience—informs her ongoing work.

Katie Lyle grew up in Ontario and received her BFA from Concordia University (2005) and her MFA from the University of Victoria (2009). She has worked as a sessional instructor of drawing and painting at the University of Victoria and has exhibited across Canada. Lyle lives in Vancouver and currently works at Western Front.