Bread Baskets (2024)

Series of oil paintings encased in antique bread trays

Exhibited in group exhibitions Bitch Magic, Alma Pearl, London, UK
&
Soil Horizon, KIRKI Projects, Kastro, Sifnos Island, GR
Generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts

The compositional approach of these works speaks to ‘hyper-free-association’ that occurs in a post-internet, surrealist age. The objects and images, taken out of context, operate on a symbolic level - memories in a bricolage of new meaning. In Constructivist circles, 'algoist painting' was introduced as a series of unrelated objects juxtaposed at completely different scales. This series of works revisit this overlooked Ukrainian Avant-Garde tradition in the age of the algorithm.

The recurring red sun recalibrates Bataillean conceptions of ‘base materialism,’ an escape from monistic symbolic idealisms and human aspirations reduced onto images and objects. These paintings are ‘sun-based materialisms' – where the red sun is the heart, destabilizing the surrounding anthropo-centric objects that attempt to mirror it, commune with it, possess it.

This intention takes belief back to a matriarchal ethos, one where the binary between culture and nature is not so disparate. Re-claiming animism, the approach to these works is alchemic in imagery, form and making: fusing distemper, spirits, mediums, energy, flame and colour. Alchemists experimented with combining base metals to produce luxury metals like gold and silver.

These reflexive assemblages reverse this hierarchy within the expanded field of painting by merging seemingly disparate cultural memories and personal affinities, breaking down facades of classification based on class, value and labour. Kneading these bricolages into singular picture planes takes rise to our current era of peak globalization; where a partial processing occurs in relation to the overwhelming access to archives and information held in our hands, yet far from our grasp.