Jane Buyers, Nancy Kembry, Catharine MacTavish and Nadia Myre

Super Natural

July 9-31, 2004

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present the group exhibition Super Natural. The show consists of paintings, works on paper and video that in their own ways transcend conventionalized notions of landscape representation.

During a visit last summer to landscape painter Doris McCarthy's cottage Jane Buyers produced, on site, a series of black china ink paintings on paper. Her subject was the jack pine, perhaps the most iconic emblem of Canadian landscape dating back to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Buyers painted them in black and white and concentrated on their tops, the most signature aspect of the tree's posture. They bend, like divining rods. Mutational receptors to the four elements. Pop culture gone camping. Traditional parsings in an urban vernacular. Nature recontextualized.

Nancy Kembry is known for her paintings in the still life genre. Unlike the traditionalists, she paints from memory rather than observation. In this latest body of work she applies the same goals and technical principles found in her still life work to her work in landscape. The actual forms used in these paintings were inspired by the book Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Kembry says that the book "is a surrealistic view of what the world would be like after a nuclear war. Hoban constructs the work using a modified phonetic form of the English language in which the characters, in their quest to decipher pre-nuclear war remains often take man-made structures as natural occurrences. To them concrete pillars are understood as "stoan wood" (stone wood). Thus formed the image of trees as pillars. In these pieces, rather than pillars observed as trees, I have used the alternative concept of trees observed as pillars." (see full text)

Night Vision is an ongoing series of paintings by Catharine MacTavish that date back to 1977. They are complex studies of visual perception. In February 2003 we assembled a concise survey of works from 1977 to 2003. In the fall of 2003 Ben Portis, assistant curator of contemporary art at the A.G.O., discovered a Night Vision painting (#14) from 1981-83 in the A.G.O.'s permanent collection and exhibited it alongside works by Stephen Andrews, Jack Goldstein and Jerry Pethick. In his painting, Andrews turns to Turner's Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge and replicates the painting to scale as a handrendered low resolution reproduction of the original. In MacTavish's latest Night Vision painting (#18) the scale and composition of Vangogh's The Starry Night nightscape is situated in the lower half of the work. "As the eye moves upwards, Van Gogh's organization morphs into my own examination of the night sky informed by optics and characterized by permeable boundaries, with a wink at Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," writes MacTavish. (see full text)

The video Portrait In Motion by Nadia Myre derives from a larger body of work, Cont[r]act. In this video the artist paddles a canoe of her own making through the mist and towards the viewer. You hear the sounds of birds and the breaking of water. The single camera take lasts four minutes and then repeats. Visual artist Robert Houle writes about the canoe, which is called History in TwoParts. It "celebrates Myre's original culture and provides a vehicle for addressing a repressed history and culture that lurks beneath the tourism industry's representations of the Canadian wilderness as uninhabited. ...It serves notice that the social and economic development of our nation state began with the adoption of the birchbark canoe by fur traders, coureurs de bois, voyageurs, and white settlers. Constructing a life-sized canoe of two distinct halves (birch bark and aluminum) makes us beautifully visible. Her object becomes more than cottage country, recreational equipment; it becomes something representing our contribution to society."

Jane Buyers lives in Elmira, Ontario and teaches in the Fine Art Department at the University of Waterloo. Nancy Kembry and Catharine MacTavish live and work in Toronto. Nadia Myre lives and works in Montreal.