Carol Wainio: In The Viewing Room

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Carol Wainio, "Chasing Windmills," 2021

acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

In The Viewing Room: Carol Wainio 

Carol Wainio belongs to the generation of Canadian painters whose artistic practice was influenced by the conceptual and political currents permeating the world in the 1970’s. She is known for both her technical ability and generosity of imagination. On the one hand, Wainio's paintings are emphatically constructed, drawing attention to the shaping and delineating character of paint and line, as well as between representational styles. On the other hand, her work engenders an approach to painting that is marked by abstract and expressionist concerns, and by a desire to use painting as a means to think about representation itself.  Her paintings are visually and conceptually full: lush and textured passages of paint compliment metaphorical layers replete with references to the past and present; to popular and high art, and their attendant modes of representation. 

In speaking to this body of work, Carol Wainio has noted: 

My work uses the slow, historically laden medium of painting to make work where modes of representation (past, present, high art and vernacular) meet and engage in a discursive, visceral wondering about history, representation, narrative, experience, and the current climate (in all its meanings). It draws together diverse sources - historical illustration and its forgotten offshoots in early advertising, archival or contemporary photographs, genre painting, or children’s drawings – to mingle in paint grounds, investigating or re-staging older narratives of transformation, desire, scarcity or excess, while reflecting on the now....

Recent work engages earlier narratives. Unlike fairy tales, Aesop’s fable animals were not repurposed to sell shoes or matches; they embodied more enduring human characteristics or morals. But the ground of fable’s anthropomorphized animals has shifted: the human natures they were assigned now echo with resonance.