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Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents:Christopher Roberts
NEW WORKS
September 19 - October 1
Vernissage: Saturday, September 21, 2:00 - 5:00PM
Roberts Artist Statement
For the last 30 years or so, I have been exploring landscape through paint, depicting Canada from coast to coast. I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between abstraction and representation and the way the viewer’s eye can shift from one to the other, and back again.
Dots of paint have figured prominently in my work, born out of an interest in fractal mathematics and chaos theory. I’ve used action painting techniques, ‘throwing’ paint onto the canvas to build up dots of colour which become fully realized images when viewed in whole, and disintegrate as you approach and look closer.
Recently this has led me to experiment with other mark-making methods to represent patterns found in nature, in a way that is still highly tactile but structurally and aesthetically very different. I built and learned how to operate my own CNC (Computer Numeric Controlled) machine, which engraves dots into wood to form a picture. The landscapes I create in these wood ‘paintings’ act as optical illusions of a sort, simulating movement and vibrating patterns and forming a highly detailed, almost photographic image that breaks apart into abstraction depending on the viewer’s position.
It is this tension between the ethereal and mechanical, and the ever-changing nature of landscape itself, that inspires this body of work.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
293 Dalhousie Street, Ottawa, ON, Canada, Ontario K1N 7E5
