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For the last several years I have been investigating, through painting, the visual dynamics of urban space particularly as it relates to the woman as flaneuse but more broadly encompassing issues of control and power traced through the ideals of the Enlightenment Project to the postmodern city.
I have always loved to roam the streets, alone, in the core of a big city: Montreal, New York, Toronto - preferably around dusk. From the time I was 'let loose' as a young woman it was my sign of freedom, I was unreachable, my coordinates unknown. But, even in my naiveté I realized I was being watched, I was part of a cat and mouse game. At times I was afraid and resentful but there was also a perverse pleasure in testing the limits of safety, in transgressing the boundaries. But it was not until Paris, the city of the original flaneur that I learned how to watch back. I could also record and therefore remember. I had evidence. From then on I was watched but with suspicion or curiosity but little desire.
This group of eleven paintings, SIGHTINGS, began from the hundreds of black and white photographs I take when roaming the city. These function as my sketches. My reason for choosing a small segment of a photographic image to paint from the many possibilities is primarily determined by my ability to construct an imaginary narrative or event connected to the chosen fragment. This fiction is overlaid onto the chosen site in the form of abstract coloured images or shapes that covertly elude to the occurrence. These imagined incidents become the sightings.
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