SEAN WILLIAM RANDALL: Introductions, April 12 to May 12, 2012, Weiss Gallery, Calgary

April 12 to May 12, Weiss Gallery, Calgary

By Margaret Bessai

Sean William Randall’s city-scapes invoke our innate memory of place — walking downtown in the rain, sleepless, staring out into tiny worlds across the darkness, hanging out by the empty Dairy Queen, staring at the long spring afternoon reflected in the shadows of the plate-glass window. “These scenes catch the corner of my eye,” Randall says. “If I could, I would paint them right there.” Worked up from black gesso in a limited palette on panel, the brushstrokes are invisible. Each scene plays with reflections, abstracting reality. Randall works from reference photos, but is not interested in the limitations of photo-realism dictated by the lens: single view-point, depth of field, random details. Instead, he strives to paint how we remember time, possibly outside the 21st century experience of it, mediated by digital devices that interrupt, freeze, instantly share, and re-contextualize. At the Weiss Gallery, his work will be shown in a debut exhibition with work by Karrie Arthurs, Tim Merrett, and Debra VanTuinen.