New Land Paintings

Stephanie Aitken

March 11 to April 9, 2011

In its title, Stephanie Aitken’s exhibition New Land Paintings references John Cage’s New River Watercolors, produced largely through chance operations: a lacunae of classical representation. With her new series, Aitken seeks to “configure paintings that entice yet forbid entry, furthering the natural function of pictorial push and pull” operating in the medium. Disavowing fidelity to any specific source imagery, Aitken re-remembers the bogs and clear cuts, the conventionally scenic as well as the burned and degraded zones of the BC Coastal landscape through a “felt-sense” of place. Though they are a dense accretion of memory, ambiguity and abstraction, Aitken has named these paintings for specific locales. Compelled in part by the native art inspired mid-century pseudo abstraction of Jack Shadbolt and Margaret Peterson—and the use of “compositional devices” to create a quality of resistance—Aitken’s landscapes possess a density of surface residing within a kind of symbolist certainty.

Stephanie Aitken completed her MFA at the University of Victoria in 1994. Recent exhibitions include Added Value at Platform Centre in Winnipeg in 2010, Headlands at Helen Pitt Gallery ARC, Vancouver, 2005 and Mount Analog at Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, 2007. A recipient of grant awards from The Canada Council and The BC Arts Council, Aitken has had critical notice of her work published in The Vancouver Review, The Walrus and C Magazine. She resides in Vancouver where she teaches at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University. This is her third exhibition with Deluge Contemporary Art (Veins of Dust, Something to Adore).