ARLENE WASYLYNCHUK, February 10 – 27, 2007, Scott Gallery, Edmonton
unknown
"Mistaya #2"
Arlene Wasylynchuk, "Mistaya #2," oil on canvas, 72" x 54".
ARLENE WASYLYNCHUK
Scott Gallery, Edmonton
February 10 – 27, 2007
By Gilbert A. Bouchard
Arlene Wasylynchuk loves Alberta’s grand vistas and diverse ecosystems so much, she’s trying to capture all of it in her cutting-edge landscape painting. “I’m trying to fracture the landscape, getting beneath and beyond appearances,” says the Edmonton-based painter. She wants viewers to focus on more than the quick fix of the surface of her work. “I’m trying to paint the deeper landscape as well as capturing the intransigent in these paintings. I want people to think about the whole environment when they look at these images and I’m not about painting the typical vista.” Loosely citing the late theorist Jacques Derrida, Wasylynchuk says she’s deconstructing the vista, so she can reconstruct it in a new and more connected way for her viewers. This love of fragmented vistas, while extreme in this newest body of work, is not a totally new thing for Wasylynchuk, who has long been known for a body of composite landscape vistas that sits in an interesting space between abstraction and naturalism. “I’m going for the heightened sense of colour you feel when you’re in the woods,” she says. “This is about the emotional colour of the vista and I’m changing the palate quite a bit.”
Represented by: Scott Gallery, Edmonton; Virginia Christopher Fine Art, Calgary.