Road Trip: A Painting Exhibition

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Gavin Lynch, "Brook in the Woods (California)," 2019

acrylic on wood panel, 18" x 24"

Mónica Reyes Gallery is pleased to invite you to "Road Trip: A Painting Exhibition" with works by Gavin Lynch, Corri-Lynn Tetz and M.E. Sparks, Opening Reception on Thursday, November 14 from 5-7 PM.

The exhibition title “Road Trip” alludes to the magnificence of constant movement, that flowing sense of adventure and chance, connecting oneself to a multitude of different surroundings and environments. Gavin Lynch, a painter based in Wakefield, QC, returned to the West Coast where he once lived while completing his BFA at Emily Carr University (2009). This recent trip around BC and California was the source of inspiration not only for these new works, but for the show we are presenting at the gallery.

The painted landscape is of essence in this exhibition. Corri-Lynn Tetz' unidentified figures are carefully placed within the landscape, not interacting with it but constituting an integral part of it – a feature especially enticing in the two small scale works presented in this show. Whereas Gavin Lynch investigates the formation or composition of landscape and nature through his collage-like approach to painting and added elaborate dimensional sand elements; M.E. Sparks only leaves the viewer with the hint of representational spaces, opening up an imaginative sphere of form and colour. 

Gavin Lynch plays with the format of a collage and achieves the cut-out characteristics through painterly technique, further increasing the depth of the works by adding intricate forms created with sand. At first sight, the paintings may appear to be only slight interventions and repositioning of a realistic depiction, yet they also work to both mesmerize and challenge perceptions of nature and landscape. (I didn’t quite understand this sentence, so I changed it slightly. Does it make sense?) 

Corry-Lynn's works are drawn from romantic histories of a figure in a landscape and the seemingly endless possibilities of surface and form. Evoking memory or a distant, artificial arcadia, more poetic than narrative – with bodies and nature activated through inventive figuration, high key and muted colour combinations, abstract interventions and intuitive gestures. 

From these slight hints of abstraction in Corry-Lynn's works, we go to M.E. Sparks' works- embracing abstraction. In the painting “Hocked and Hounded” (2018), she borrows the form of a black hollyhock from the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. Reconfiguring the floral shape as a repeated motif, the painting retains a representational familiarity while leaning into an unknown and undefinable space. In her 2016 series “Vision Block (No.1-12)”, Sparks reflects on the act of looking. Within these paintings, the circular gestures (reminiscent of a binocular-like viewfinder) represent an exchange or mergence between subject and object; observer and observed. The repeated forms shift from known to unknown, from concrete to abstract, simultaneously obstructing and constructing the space of painting. 

About the artists

Gavin Lynch (Wakefield, Quebec) is quickly becoming a key player in the new vision of landscape painting that is invigorating this archetypal Canadian genre.  Employing a collage approach to the picture plane, Lynch resists pictorial and painterly continuity in favour of unexpected and often conflicting combinations of elements, some derived from memory, others from the artist’s imagination. Sharply delineated forms are juxtaposed with fluid areas, while highly stylized rocks and trees are painted in naturalistic colours. Wavering between material flatness and pictorial depth, luminosity and darkness, and abstraction and representation, these paintings exude an energizing tension that invites extended looking.Gavin Lynch holds a BFA from Emily Carr University (2009) and a MFA from the University of Ottawa (2012). He is the recipient of awards and grants from various organizations, including the Canada Council for the Arts (2014), the Ontario Arts Council (2013) and the Province of Ontario (2011). In 2014 Lynch was a finalist in the RBC Painting Competition, which was exhibited at the Musée des Beaux Arts. His work has been exhibited across Canada, featured in Canadian Art magazine and is in various collections, including Simon Fraser University, TD Canada Trust and the City of Ottawa Permanent Collection. Lynch lives and works in Wakefield, Quebec, just outside of Ottawa.

Corri-Lynn Tetz (Calgary, AB) paintings are personal re-takes of the figure in landscapes. Utilizing found photographs as a reference, she works without sketches, allowing forms and content to emerge gradually as she paints.Tetz is intrigued in charged points of interactions between figures and/or the landscape; in the ways meaning shifts, opens or reconfigures, as a found photo becomes a painting. In collecting and transforming these representations of women's bodies, personalizing and re-working the figures so they speak more to experience than to a mastering gaze. Corri-Lynn Tetz lives and works in Montreal. She obtained her MFA at Concordia University (2015) and he BFA at Emily Carr University (2008). Her work was featured in the Magenta Foundation's publication Carte Blanche: A Survey of Canadian Painting and in 2012 she was a finalist in the RBC Painting Competition. Furthermore she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2017), the Brucebo Foundation, Sweden (2016), or the Conseil des Art et des Lettres du Quebec (2015) among others. Most recently her work was featured in the touring exhibition American Fine Art "life's not fair and people don't act right" through the BBQLA, Los Angeles.

M.E. Sparks (Kenora, ON) paintings reassemble forms from painting history, collected objects and childhood narrative. She is interested in the false binaries of abstraction and representation within painting discourse, ideas of obfuscation, tenebrosity and the untranslatable, as well as painting’s own image-object anxieties. In her most recent work, Sparks explores the material possibilities of un-stretched canvas, incorporating cuts, slits, droops and bends in an effort to obstruct and rethink both pictorial space and historical narrative.Sparks holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and BFA from NSCAD University. Her work has recently been exhibited at Ou Gallery, Duncan (2019) and Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, Victoria (2019), and she has participated in recent group shows at South Main Gallery, Vancouver, (2019), SiteFactory, Vancouver (2018), Dynamo Arts Association, Vancouver (2018), Support, London ON (2018) and Access Gallery, Vancouver (2017). Sparks was a finalist in the 2016 and 2017 RBC Painting Competitions and a recipient of awards and grants from the Nancy Petry Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Arts Nova Scotia. She has participated in artist residencies in Canada, Germany and Finland and will attend the Vermont Studio Centre in 2020.