Saturday, January 5, 2013

Opening: Janna Watson @ Bau-Xi Gallery

Levitation
Paintings by Janna Watson @ Bau-Xi Gallery

January 12 - 26th, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, Jan. 12th, 2-4pm

I've long since been in love with the paintings of local artist Janna Watson. One part painter, one part collaborator, she is also part of the multidisciplinary art/design collective Tinsel and Sawdust
Last year she put together a really incredible installation alongside furniture maker and fellow Sheridan grad, Katrina Tompkins for the Gladstone Hotel's Annual design event Come Up To My Room. You can find out more about that collaboration here. Here is a statement about her exhibition opening at Bau-Xi Gallery, and a look at her works and thought process below.

Janna Watson is a young artist who has enjoyed early success in her painting career, shortly after graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Watson's expressive abstract paintings possess a beautiful sense of freedom and emotional energy. In this highly anticipated exhibition of new paintings, Watson aims to explore the notions of artwork as an extension of self.

Line has an invisible and tangible ability to transmit energy and information. Line is what weaves forms and thought together and guides the eye through volume, space and time; it makes my thought process visible. Thoughts are triggered by outside influences, physically processed, and then sent outward once again. Thoughts cannot be possessed. They are simple, sometimes intruding, fleeting and completely intimate. They are the structures that manifest into real life with uncomprehendable potential. These are the qualities imbued in line. Line is used as a metaphor in my work, for the lifespan of a thought caught on canvas. It also symbolizes my opposing yet symbiotic lifestyles visible in the tension between organic and geometric forms. When I am painting, I strive to communicate the ideas I am digesting which give form to the image. 
Using a hybridizing and synthetic set of tactics, my work is intended to 
(con)fuse categories of painterly and graphic, landscape and body, 2D and 3D, to blend tension and coherence as one. - Janna Watson














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