Beholder

Art Gallery of Regina, 2014

Beholder uses images of garden roses past their prime. We see them in shadow and light, exploring beauty redefined and honoring our basic needs of being seen and feeling worthy. Is beauty always present, if we can only see it? The Art Gallery of Regina hosted this solo exhibition in April and May, 2014.

View exhibition catalogue here. View catalogue essay by Catherine Macaulay here. View exhibition installation here.

Artworks are available directly from the artist. All works are framed unless otherwise stated.

Artist’s Statement

Familiar, dear, and significant, the rose is among the oldest of flowers and among the most widely adored. Its delicate, sweetly-scented loveliness has been a symbol of nearly every kind of perfection, in mythology, religion, art, commerce, politics, war, and romance. Always, whenever the rose is used, we think of the love that loveliness engenders.

But like all that is alive, roses fade. And if beauty brings love, the fading of beauty must also bring the end of love. Or must it?  Time produces change, and change produces the need for constant personal reinvention. In the paintings in Beholder, beauty has already passed. But in its place we see a wholly different kind of beauty. Is beauty always present, if we can only see it? When the human spirit becomes entangled in human feelings, can the knots be untied?

Throughout my artistic career, I have explored the relationship of the self to the spirit. For most of twenty years, this imagery was representational, narrative, and figurative. Then during the production of the work that became part of a two-person exhibition called Bequest, with Honor Kever, and which toured western Canada for over a year and a half in 2002 and 2003, the figures left my work. Searching to discover what might replace or stand in for that human presence, I discovered the rose.

The production of this artwork was supported in part by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre for the Arts.