Beth Stuart: Braiding a Hole
Beth Stuart: Braiding a Hole
May 23 to July 19, 2009
The paintings by Toronto-based artist Beth Stuart may be misinterpreted as abstraction. Having recently transitioned from image-based figurative painting, Stuart’s new work occupies a place between the formed and the formless, the fragmented and the whole. Stuart cites both proto-feminist discourse around the predominantly abstract work of female artists in the 1960s and the interrupted illusions of the surrealist painters of the 1920s as sources of inspiration in the creation of her new work in the exhibition Braiding a Hole.
Stuart is a conceptual painter. She paints from a perspective that is curious, distanced by her youth and her lack of proximity to 1960s feminism, yet she inhabits, performs, and subverts the feminist inscriptions in her paintings. Likewise, Stuart’s interest in surrealism’s strategic introduction/interruption of illusion in the form of perspective, gravity, and the cast shadow, is but one device that she employs in “picturing” an anti-rational philosophy. Her works do not quote these historical models; rather, they propose unanswered questions regarding the possibilities of translating ideology into affect and into image.
Beth Stuart completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University (Montreal). Currently, she is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Guelph. Selected recent exhibitions include art in the fall at Nuit Blanche (Toronto), the end (ORANGEBROWN) at Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), and Exquisite Stiff at Galerie VAV (Montreal). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Tony Scherman Graduate Scholarship, the Dean’s Scholarship (University of Guelph), the Ada Lovelace Award, and the Heinz Jordan Award for excellence in painting.
Images:
Left: Melissa, new scarf, 2008, oil on linen
Right: Accretion, 2008, oil on canvas