• Paul Petro Contemporary Art
• Paul Petro Special Projects Space
• Paul Petro @ 100 Yonge
• Paul Petro Multiples + Small Works

• Archive

• Jay Isaac's CV
• The Zone of No Ideas, 2010
• The Energy of the Sun, 2008
• The Beauty of Things..., 2007
• Misty Horizon, 2002
• Hinterland, 2001

• Accompanying Text
• Images

Jay Isaac

Misty Horizon

Mar 8-Apr 6, 2002

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Misty Horizon, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Toronto-based artist Jay Isaac. In this latest body of work Isaac continues to manipulate the traditions of landscape and still life that were central to Hinterland, his previous exhibition at the gallery.

The new works synthesize the concerns of sculpture and painting into autonomous forms. Landscape elements, set within fantastical non-spaces, provide a contrast of realism to the otherwise abstract strategies. A continuously opposing tension comes out of an “earnest” desire to produce beautiful and sublime landscape paintings and an opposing interest that embraces grotesque or lowly modes of expression.

Isaac's work is currently on exhibition in Bologna in the international group show Officina America, curated by Renato Barilli. His work is included in the upcoming show Synthetic Psychosis, a group exhibition on new Toronto painting curated by David Liss for the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). His work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Mercer Union (Toronto) in Fall 2002.

Jay was born in 1975 in Saint John, New Brunswick. He attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design (1993-97) and the Cardiff Institute of Art & Design (1996). He lived and worked in the U.K, primarily in Bristol, for two years (1997-99) before settling in Toronto.

"Returning home one night I started to watch TV and came across an early sci-fi programme. I hadn't seen the first half but could figure out what was happening anyway. One of the main characters' persona had been removed from his physical body and was now housed in a glowing sphere. Side by side the body and the sphere were placed and the sphere was talking exactly like the character talked before this event took place. The voice was perfectly clear and fully aware of the predicament at hand.

"Then it struck me, 'why was this glowing sphere talking exactly like the character, with the same physical voice, when the sphere didnt' have a voicebox, or a tongue, or any implements of speech?' In my mind the fiction all of a sudden had a glitch. In the excitement of ruining the believability of the TV programme, I overlooked the simple point that all the other elements of the fiction, like being in outer space or having your persona removed and housed in a glowing sphere, were just as unbelievable.

"When a reality is a fiction then anything can be constructed as believable. Because my fiction-building is selfaware and conveys a fabricated reality then anything can be constructed as believable within this fantasy. This overtly indulgent way of thinking is a basis for most of my creative actions, and needs to be intervened upon by introducing elements that teeter on the edge of making everything fall apart. Using decadent forms of expression, like intuition and oil painting, can only be subverted by using other decadent forms of expression, like beauty and good painting."

- Jay Isaac