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My paintings begin from the black and white photographs I take of the sterile interiors of such seemingly public spaces as the lobbies' of multinational corporations or the underground passageways that control the flow of people. As a woman, my relation to public space has always been problematised by gender and power relations. The photographs I take in this performative aspect of my process are psychological impressions, located everywhere yet nowhere, rather than an attempt at literal documentation. Both the photographs and the paintings that evolve from them are visualizations of feminist geography.
One of my major concerns is with the hybrid space of our contemporary globalized
environment. In these spaces, the real and the virtual mingle becoming immersive,
destabilizing and ecstatic. In the spaces through which I travel, photographing
becomes a transgressive act done with the knowledge that I am under electronic
surveillance, surveying the surveyors. But, I am primarily watched not by the
desiring 19th century man, the flâneur who, in part, once watched women
on the streets of Paris but by the all seeing electronic eye. Panopticonic space
has moved outside of Jeremy Betham’s prison censoring our actions even
in our blind spots. Extending beyond the urban 'gaze' of the surveillance camera,
now we can all be tracked and positioned even in the wilderness. Space has collapsed
blending the near and the far, the real and the virtual, the urban and the rural.
In my paintings I try to visualize this new globalized space that is layered
and fluid. I merge impressions of my present urban environment with, for example,
those seen on T.V. of a bomb exploding in a remote village, memories of living
for four months in a tent on Meares Island, B.C., or looking out of a train
window going across Siberia.
I see the surfaces of my paintings as hovering somewhere between skin and screen
caressed by my touch but with no tracking of the hand/brush visible. The colour
is purposely fake. Life has turned into 'still life' frozen on the screen,
reflected in the glass, observed, recorded, transmitted, digitized. The
elongated, panoramic format of the paintings envelops our gaze and reflects
back to the historic panoramic photos of natural wonders. Translucent shiny
layers of colour act as both barriers and filters that position the viewers or
spectators as the surveyors looking out from the gaps or 'windows' in the imagined viewing chambers.
The extreme contrasts of light and dark evoke the sublime, but not the sublime
in nature seen in the work of the 19th century painters such as Friedrich and Turner.
Now that nature has been observed, measured, subjected to experiments and tabulated as
part of the Enlightenment Project, it may retain its beauty but it has lost much of the
sense of terror intrinsic to the sublime. In out ability to evoke this emotion 'god'
has been replaced by man. Within the contemporary world, man's technological achievements
have become the new sublime, the techno- sublime. But in assuming this role of 'god' have
we become Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein?
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