Rosalind Breen + Corri-Lynn Tetz: Golden Hour

×

Expand

Corri-Lynn Tetz, "Conjure," 2017

oil on canvas, 30" x 30"

There is an opening reception on Friday, June 2 from 6-9 pm, with both artists in attendance.

One year ago, the work of Rosalind Breen was significantly different. They were large-scale paintings of iconic (and nostalgic) characters - Willy Wonka, the Spice Girls, characters from Lord of the Flies. These characters were painted in dream-like settings and partially constructed landscapes. Corri-Lynn Tetz’ paintings of ethereal landscapes populated with blurred, nude figures with a muted palate have remained consistent. A year ago, the connection between Breen’s paintings and Corri-Lynn Tetz’ work was immediate, and obvious. The similarities in not only execution, but in the desire to create an image with ambiguity were what had originally prompted the idea for the exhibition.

Since that time, a significant shift in Breen’s execution has resulted in a far less obvious connection, but excitingly, deeper, more symbolic ones: light and longing. Both deeply relied upon lighting and the bare minimum of information to create a narrative. Tetz notes that light has become a really important part of her paintings: “a way of signaling experience without having to illustrating the specifics of what that is. Rosalind is talking about the mundane and ambiguous and I like connecting those ideas to the historic use of light in painting and how it signaled ideas of the 'divine'.”

For Breen, another connection was through a shared sense of longing. “Sometimes when looking at the figures in our work, I feel a deep sense of longing. Longing from the characters, longing to know more about what is going on, longing to be apart of the plot. That is a theme that motivates a lot of my own work. I include fruits, pomegranates, apples, lemons and limes all to play with the archetype of desire and longing… the forbidden fruit. Beyond buttery light pouring through fields or nature, when I suggested the title I was thinking about the Golden Hour through the context of mythology and fable. It was the hour of transformation, the climatic moment of reveal... it was the point where the plot would all be come clear. Corri-Lynn and I both make such ambiguous works, that to have a show called the Golden Hour almost feels like presenting that second before the great reveal. The moment of breath held, anticipation, wonder and excitement.”

In the body of works created by Breen for Golden Hour, she aimed to explore ideas of finding myth in the mundane and ambiguous images. She drew from personal memories and desires and then reduced the images to bones through collage. She embraced familiarity and nostalgia “to create a shared experience, to illuminate memories that bring people together in solidarity”.Tetz has continued her focus on ritual, and ideas of transcendent experience. Through “discarding the utopic/idyllic weight of a figure in landscape”, she has attempted to shape “evocative, interior, dreamscapes, or, spaces where my connection to painting, the figure and to the transformation of found images, filters personal experience and a temporal curiosity towards the immaterial.”