Quest Art's 2019 TD Thor Wealth Management Juried Exhibition

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Encased within a clear acrylic globe are thousands of ball bearings clustered around magnets forming small mounds paired with tiny birds’ feet. I call them Magnetic Skeletons. Beneath the birds are clumps of iron filings so abundant that they form stalactites. Magnetic Skeleton (plural) visualizes a flight of birds interrupted. The magnetism that once guided them on a migratory path is shown here arresting them to earth. They bear enormous weight. The steel balls that make up their bodily forms are physically heavy yet reminiscent of atoms fervently orbiting life. The magnetism that pulls them is omnipresence, even in death.

Dimensions: 106 x 76 x 73

100 word Artist Statement about the work: I am captivated and inspired by uncommon beauty imbedded within the common living world. My work celebrates life and explores relationships among natural and artificial environments in dark and light. My art captured glimpses of life and encapsulated them in wood, that image is seen emerging from painted surface, appearing as an individual integrated piece of work.

Dimensions: 45.72 x 60.96 x 3.81

100 word Artist Statement about the work: In February 2017, I travelled to Michoacán, Mexico to see Monarch butterflies in their winter habitat. While travelling up the mountainside, only a handful of butterflies were spotted. However, at the top, in a protected grove of Oyamel fir trees we found hundreds of thousands of Monarchs clinging to branches. They looked like dead leaves. It was breathtaking. Imagine. These tiny butterflies had flown over 4,000 miles. As the sun rose and touched each branch, the Monarchs burst apart in a fluttering mass of colour. Roosting Monarchs celebrates the wonder, beauty and resilience of nature.

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Through distilling the nebulous into the tangible and concrete, I try to render fleeting moments as permanent and substantial. Attracted to states of contrast and contradiction, I'm interested in how at the point of any extreme, things tend to revert to their opposite. For example lightness becomes heavy, opacity becomes transparent, the internal becomes external, the fragile becomes strong, what is hidden or obfuscated is revealed. Glass as a medium embodies these paradoxes. The inherent nature of the material and its intrinsic tensions naturally lend themselves to these aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Contradictions and ambiguity interest me, for this is where poetry can be found. Recently I have made a number of pieces about species on the brink of extinction. Preoccupied with how much of our natural world is disappearing I am concerned by how rapidly the flora and fauna of the planet's landscapes are transforming. Change seems accelerated these days and a collective sense of natural history and unity has disappeared. Our ability to remember and reflect seems permanently altered by a reliance on technology. In this climate I feel a sense of urgency to preserve some memory of natural and cultural history before it slips forever out of the collective consciousness.

Dimensions: 61 x 61 x 7

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Hazy, indeterminate space; a boundless expanse of atmosphere. Background and foreground, form and space are suspended between medium and surface. Paint recedes, erases, engulfs and strikes forward. Some marks loose and hesitant, unsure, dance around and disappear into the picture plane while others confidently assert themselves, scratching the surface, breaking the fog and shadows. The composition fights for balance; calm negative space wrestling with the chaos and tension of drawing and mark-making. In a collaborative relationship with the creative process, each mark unplanned, of the moment, leaving a record of the time they were created. By working fast, the hand executes before the brain interrupts.

Dimensions: 50 x 55

100 word Artist Statement about the work: These Ontario themed landscapes represent my three most recent works. They share a similar time of day, and I tried to reconstruct that feel with both the oil paint, and the various mediums/techniques.

Dimensions: 91 x 162 x 4

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Diana's Flight Series based on photographs she takes while travelling by airplane. This is the world viewed from a slightly different yet very familiar angle. She uses thin layers of oil paint on wood panel, high-lighted with chalk or pencil, to create impressions of the patterns made by roads, bridges and settlements as laid over the natural features of the landscape.

Dimensions: 76 x 101 x 4

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Environment and simplicity are a recurring theme in my life and my work. Exploring natural areas such as forests, swamps and waterways has been a life-long passion. I want to explore the role environment plays in life from a universal, primal and spiritual perspective. My current work is focused primarily on water. I believe water has a consciousness that we are all connected to. Major inspiration comes from the writings of anthropologist, scientist and philosopher, Loren Eiseley, who writes about that unconscious connection. I want to call on the viewer to "recall" their deepest and sometimes mixed emotions regarding water.

Dimensions: 36 x 48 x 1.5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: I am interested in our spiritual connection to our urban landscape and the potential of awareness it evokes within us. During my schooling, I was drawn to the ideas of the BauHaus Movement, specifically Kandinsky and Rauschenberg. I was impressed that Kandinsky broke new ground, making us look at things in a different way. In the work of Rauschenberg, I encountered the concept of “assemblages”. I continue to pursue “Craftsman-Like Assemblages” combined with “Fine Art” painting. I aspire to create works that offer a new way of seeing with the intention the work will resonate spiritually with the viewer.

Dimensions: 130 x 104 x 36

100 word Artist Statement about the work: As our sense of sight must delineate and translate what we see, the interconnected shapes and images of my work necessitate interpretation. Beginning with one single image found amongst an abstracted mass of lines and colour, the composition grows organically; each contour and shape connects to form the whole and a theme or narrative begins to emerge. With a surrealistic undertone, the work ultimately becomes a narration and encourages the viewer to interpret what they see and create the story behind the images.

Dimensions: 40 x 36 x 1.5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Social media bombards us with inspirational quotes and messages telling us to appreciate every moment, to choose happiness, to want more, to want less, to do more, to do less, to live mindfully, to let it all go. We scroll past these seemingly uplifting reminders in a few seconds that are ultimately telling us whatever it is we’re doing, it is not adequate. What if instead we actually engaged in meaningful conversation about our internal thoughts? What if we could see beyond the curated lives we all seem to present now?

Dimensions: 61 x 76 x 4

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Much like a contemporary flâneuse, I wander my local environments to flush out the distinct components of the ecosystem. I also collect discarded treasures and fallen branches for the mischievously playful renovation of local trees and landscape interventions. The collected treasures are assembled into prosthetic tree limbs and memorialised in intimate graphite portraits or fused into new, amorphic creatures. The contemplative act of drawing allows me to devote my attention to local environments and form affinities between biological and manufactured elements. Once complete, they are released back into their native environments as interventions, or interruptions in the local landscape.

Dimensions: 60 x 42