AMY DRYER: "Urban Blueprints," May 23 to June 8, 2013, Axis Contemporary Art, Calgary
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John Dean
"Typography"
Amy Dryer, "Typography," 2013, oil on canvas, 48" x 36".
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John Dean
"Train Through"
Amy Dryer, "Train Through," 2013, oil on canvas, 42” x 60”.
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John Dean
"Typography"
Amy Dryer, "Typography," 2013, oil on canvas, 48" x 36".
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John Dean
"Alley"
Amy Dryer, "Alley," 2013, oil on canvas, 48" x 48"
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John Dean
"Windows & Wires"
Amy Dryer, "Windows & Wires," 2013, oil on canvas, 48" x 60".
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John Dean
"Homeward"
Amy Dryer, "Homeward," 2013, oil on canvas, 60" x 48".
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John Dean
"Through the Wires"
Amy Dryer, "Through the Wires," 2012, oil on canvas, 24" x 24".
AMY DRYER: Urban Blueprints
May 23 to June 8, 2013
Axis Contemporary Art, Calgary
By Thomas E. Hardy
Amy Dryer’s hometown of Calgary, where she continues to live, has become the subject of her new work. This engagement is all-inclusive, allowing her to paint outdoors and to bring her attachment to the city into her painting practice. Dryer has studied in Alberta, New Brunswick and Scotland. For this show, research also played a role as she consulted source material in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum: Maps and architectural drawings that document the city’s growth. Dryer describes her work as the “interplay between chaos and structure, and that’s how I see the city,” she says. “There are drawings and preparations that go into the creating of a city, but then, in the real world, there is this chaos of mark-making … of beauty in the mess of reality.” In a work like Train Through, she energetically pulls together disparate elements to create the urban atmosphere that interests her. There is open, silent, empty space transformed by the bolting passage of a grinding train, faintly outlined, like a ghost. Networks of lines organize the space like a scaffold or skeleton, and patches of colour then flesh it out, the train moving through like a memory or an emotional response. Rather than taking the body as a subject, as in earlier paintings, this new work allows Dryer to focus more on delineations of space, yet still treat the city as a body, a figure with a history.