↳ Exhibitions

Sky Glabush at Clint Roenisch

September 30, 2018

Artist: Sky Glabush

Exhibition title: The Valley Of Love

Venue: Clint Roenisch, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 7 – October 20, 2018

Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid /all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch, Toronto

These new paintings are stories. But what language do they speak? Who are the characters? How is meaning constructed? Paintings operate, in some sense, outside of language. Or they employ a language unbound and unencumbered by text. If there is a story in painting it speaks across time and is often dislocated and liberated from the specificity of a particular reading. It has no beginning or end. Time, process, and labour are embedded in painting’s surface yet are non-sequential, non-durational. Unlike a novel or play which unfold over events and intervals, there is no starting point within painting and it appears all at once, similar to the way we perceive a person. A person has a history and is the product of embodied memory and experience, and imagination. But when we seek to really see a persona we perceive a totality not a collection of parts.

For many years now I have perhaps been dismantling my practise. I have looked at it from a variety of angles exploring history, identity, and memory and revelling in the vastness and range open to me. But I have decided to return to painting as maybe a way to synthesize some of these approaches and to try to fuse these threads into a focussed narrative structure. I truly don’t understand why certain ideas and feelings seem to emerge and almost push me around in the studio. But I have tried to be receptive to these promptings, to listen closely to these voices. The first painting I made in this series is a large portrait. It picks up on a type of painting that I have been doing for several years: paintings that I would try to start and complete in one sitting, that were spontaneous, intuitive and which evoke of a kind of reflexivity or psychology. But unlike these immediate, intimate little paintings, I began to create a large work that adopts an almost a mural-like motif like you might find on the side of a municipal building or school. It employs a kind of story-telling approach but the narrative is uncertain, the story reticent, the meaning deferred. In this way I am seeking the direct clarity of a public story with the private, undisclosed structure of my imagination. The more I write about this process the less I believe what I am saying.