Anyssa Fortie: Pleasant Field

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Anyssa Fortie, "The Stars I Never Saw (Study) (detail)," 2020,

oil on canvas, 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Anyssa Fortie: Pleasant Field

Through the creation of a new body of work, Pleasant Field, Kamloops-based artist Anyssa Fortie has developed an immersive installation based on recollections of places and events as abstracted memories. Taking an autobiographical approach, Fortie pulls from past experiences and examines how they have transformed over time. She is interested in how memories change through re-telling and re-remembering them. Fortie probes questions about what makes an experience memorable. How is it that some memories fade through a loss of details while others remain memorable because of the small details? Fortie finds herself questioning her own memory, asking herself: What did I actually see, smell, hear? She observes that over time memories tend to shift, evoking new emotions, resulting in the simplification or complication of a memory, so that it becomes an abstracted version of what really happened.

Boiling down her memories to their key components, Fortie is left with fragments of imagery: a fountain, a bundle of rope, a foot. These seemingly unrelated objects are synthesized to create a narrative that serves as a pathway to the past. Through Pleasant Field, paintings and sculptures work together to create an alternate reality, immersing the viewer in a landscape of memories as they exist at this moment in time. 

Fortie’s new body of work builds on her undergraduate project, which she developed while completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Thompson Rivers University in 2017 that focused on experiences of coming of age and the tension between childhood and adulthood. Maintaining a distinctly playful and colourful aesthetic, Fortie’s loosely rendered marks and associations flow across the canvas and the walls of The Curbe, materializing in a fluid installation of two- and three-dimensional objects that inhabit an immersive environment. 

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery