THERESA SAPERGIA "I Like Canada and Canada Likes Me," August 21 to November 9, 2009, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George

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"Untitled"

Theresa Sapergia, "Untitled," oil on canvas, 2009.

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"Fairy Tales for Loss"

Theresa Sapergia, "Fairy Tales for Loss," coloured pencil on paper, 2009.

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"Untitled"

Theresa Sapergia, "Untitled," oil on canvas, 2009.

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THERESA SAPERGIA

I Like Canada and Canada Likes Me, August 21 to November 9, 2009, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George

BY: Portia Priegert

Theresa Sapergia considers a post-apocalyptic world without humans in her new exhibition of large-scale painting and drawing at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George. Her focal point is a 20-foot-long painting depicting a flooded city — with Prince George’s iconic roadside attraction, a giant woodsman known as Mr. PG, poking up from the water. “The meek of the earth, the little critters, the mice and rabbits and whatnot, have taken refuge on him as though this is the last bit of space to stand on,” says Sapergia, who returned home to Prince George two years ago after completing a Master’s degree at Concordia University in Montreal. “There are no more people. You can still see the detritus of our culture, but it’s being washed away.”

Sapergia links this latest work to driving through the vastness of the northern landscape after living in major cities, including Vancouver, where she studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She recalls being stunned by the silence after stopping on the highway. “You get that amazing thing in Canada where you are surrounded by space,” she says. “I started to think this moment could be after-the-fact, because there’s all this environmental doom in the news. I thought about what is going to happen if we destroy everything and ourselves. And, of course, the world can recover without us.”

Another painting in the exhibition depicts chaotic flocks of crows and blackbirds flying toward each other. Sapergia applies paint more generously than in the past, when it was often so minimal that her works on raw canvas could be mistaken for drawings. But she extends her images by drawing on the gallery wall to create an immersive environment for viewers. “There will be a crow and a blackbird here and there around the paintings, but also stretching out over the whole gallery so that you can get a sense that this is just one little coloured window into a larger atmosphere.”

Sapergia has long been interested in depicting the body — whether human or animal — as well as exploring issues of loss and power relations. She often suspends meticulously rendered forms ambiguously in fields of white space. At times, she has intermingled human and animal, as with her female satyrs, bare-breasted women with goat-like haunches equipped with strap-on phalluses. “I see the represented body as a site of complex social negotiations, assumptions and exchanges of power,” Sapergia writes in her artist’s statement. “I am interested in that fleshy form that lifts, falls, hovers and searches for its own likeness, a body that desires to find similarity within an image made of marks and dust.”

Sapergia may come by her interest in the animal body from her father, an antique gunsmith and hunter. She recalls finding a dead moose in the backyard as a little girl. “I can remember the excitement of being able to be so close to such a massive body. Who gets the opportunity to touch a moose? I mean, it’s sad too. I always had that undercurrent of sadness.”

After returning home, Sapergia apprenticed for a year at a tattoo parlor. She now works four days a week in her own shop and also teaches art at the University of Northern British Columbia. Still, Sapergia, who has exhibited in New York, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, somehow manages to find studio time. “I’ve got three careers. And I’m a bit greedy in that I love them all and I’m not willing to give any of them up.”