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Indepth Arts News:
"Laura Wood: Stay Awhile"
2008-06-19 until 2008-07-23
Tatar Gallery
Toronto, ON,
CA Canada
Tatar Gallery is pleased to present Stay Awhile, a new body of work by gallery artist Laura Wood. Wood paints in oil and works in abstraction through a diffuse and painterly approach to representation. This new body of work represents a departure in the artist’s practice as she explores figuration in Stay Awhile. Her previous output has included elegant studies of chandeliers and ambiguous cityscapes, rendered through an aesthetic emphasis on light and colour. While the artist begins her process with recognizable subject matter, she distills the formal beauty of the familiar to the point of abstraction. Laura Wood approaches representation as an immersion into the potentially unfamiliar terrain of the subjective.
In Stay Awhile the artist takes the human body as her point of departure and works figuratively through the suspension of its familiar parameters. Taking pornographic images as her inspiration, the artist aestheticizes the subject matter by literally altering the conditions of its perception. The images are elegant, soft, and beautiful, and create an aesthetic distance from the factual reality of the bodies and acts they represent.
In Stay Awhile the content is second to its distillation; the paintings convey the impressionistic nature of perception.
When viewing Wood’s work the recognizable is deferred, compelling the viewer to linger in an ambiguous surface. At once vaguely nostalgic and suggestive of the distortions of memory, the works suspend the viewer’s recognition of the familiar and yet preserve its traces simultaneously. This compelling tension between the known and the unknown prolongs the viewer’s engagement with the works, and warrants the contemplation of representation as a potentially fallible investment in “fact”.
Laura Wood’s work is held in several prominent corporate and private collections worldwide, such as The Four Seasons, Dubai, The Canaccord Adams offices Toronto & Houston, Beach Club Miami, GMP Securities LP, Montreal, and the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco. Stay Awhile is the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition with Tatar Gallery.
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