Missing the art gallery experience? Check out this online show with a focus on Canada's women artists.
By: ArtBank / 01 June 2020A new online exhibition from the Embassy of Canada Art Gallery in Washington, A New Light: Canadian Women Artists, features 38 works from across Canada.
The exhibition includes six works from the Canada Council Art Bank, including two well-loved artworks that we are highlighting in this blog:
Meryl McMaster’s photographic portrait Jin (2010).
Jin is from McMaster’s series Second-Self, which was an exploration of identity and the idea of persona through portraiture.
In a recent interview with the Art Bank, McMaster explained her process for making the series. She asked several friends with no drawing training to create blind contour self-portraits—a drawing technique where an artist makes a self-portrait without looking at their hand, drawing utensil, or paper as they draw.
McMaster noted that as the drawings reconfigured facial features in strange ways, they “revealed the subject’s self-concept not normally seen by the naked eye.”
McMaster then used the self-portraits as a blueprint, creating three-dimensional wire sculptures which she placed over the sitter’s head to take a photograph.
McMaster cites diverse artistic influences, including the theatrical pow wow dance performances of her Plains Cree tradition and the photography of Man Ray and Cindy Sherman.
McMaster said she hopes visitors to the exhibition will “take a moment to pause and think about what the image might be about and inject a new thought or perception into their day.”
Milly Ristvedt’s Strawberry Dreams, Strawberry Nightmares (©1975, CARCC)
The Art Bank purchased Ristvedt’s Strawberry Dreams, Strawberry Nightmares (1975)—a large-scale acrylic painting—in the early years of the artist’s career. Ristvedt noted that this purchase “not only meant that I could afford to produce more but gave me confidence and the assurance that somewhere someone might be thinking about it.”
The British Columbia based artist explores the nature of colour and form in her abstract paintings. Ristvedt’s affinity with colour began at an early age when she saw one of Franz Marc’s paintings of a blue horse while leafing through a magazine. “The year earlier I had fallen in love with horses and spent hours tracing images of them,” she said. “This was different; I saw that the painting was less about a horse than it was about colour.”
Ristvedt lauds the exhibition for the awareness it brings to issues of gender-identity and diversity, and it gives her hope that art exhibitions around the world will become increasingly more inclusive.
Ready to explore the exhibition in its entirety—including the works of 25 other women artists from Canada? Check it out here: connect2canada.com.
And read what other people are saying about the exhibition with these articles:
Artsfile: Exhibition at Canadian Embassy in Washington includes works by three Ottawa women
Galleries West: Washington show features Canadian women
Globe and Mail: Care for Canadian women artists buy more work by them
The Washington Diplomat: Canadian Embassy puts its art collection in new light by reinforcing diversity equality