waterfalling
Shelley Penfold | Daniel Laskarin
September 6 to October 5, 2019
Featuring painted diptychs by Vancouver-based Shelley Penfold and sculpture by Victoria’s Daniel Laskarin, waterfalling explores the nature and breadth of our human interactions. Employing an abstracted visual language arising from attraction and aversion, question and response, the work in this exhibition considers how our thoughts and conversations can break apart to reform and coalesce.
My paintings are based on chance encounters, the way materials interact with surfaces and how they come together and settle, interact, and speak to each other.
I work en plein air at times to find the language of nature. The ways that the materials mix and materialize on the surface of the paintings is not unlike the disparate synching that happens in a forest, meadow, or other landscape.
There are a multitude of narratives that exist in each work and abstraction drives some of these conversations. There are interjections of cultural symbols, personal experience, icons, architecture, and a dictionary of marks that can appear at any time on the surface. When the inner dialogue that exists while in the process of making shifts, sometimes those marks etc are removed. This removal, build up and taking away is part of the overall history of each painting and is typically allowed to show through. But, at times, the marks are laid onto the surface as deliberate moves. These moves happen after a period of thought, experimentation (will the material hold up as I think it will) and a willingness to tell a story and to express an emotion or thought of something that has been observed in my life. These are personal narratives or portraits that utilize universal markers to make the paintings relational.
There is intention involved as much as there are deliberate movements. At times, I can think about what is next for weeks or months. But once I get going those marks, moves, are laid down and left to settle to be contemplated upon, not unlike words on a page or of dark energy that exists but is not yet fully understood but has the ability to pull a universe apart.
After a career as a helicopter pilot/engineer I turned to the visual arts as a field of equal, if dissimilar, danger.
My practice is one of restless contemplation. It is object based, materially and philosophically rooted. It is an investigation of our experience of objects as other bodies and of the ways in which art may give sensory experience to consciousness, creating a bridge between substance and ineffability.
Understanding that the “expanded field” is utterly blown apart, my work makes things that stay together, that find their own order in a condition of disorder, and that at the same time remain unsettled. This work uses diverse media, drawn from industrial materials and processes, sometimes incorporating photography and video, optics, robotics systems, installation and sound. I have been involved with set design, public image projections, and large scale public commissions in the Pacific Northwest.
I have exhibited across Canada and internationally and currently teach at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria in western Canada.