13 November 2014 through 14 December 2014
Opening reception Thursday 13 November 2014, 6-9pm
Guest curated by Elizabeth Zvonar
It’s not everyday I get really excited about painting. Exciting painting pops and pulsates and confuses me a little. Deirdre McAdams' canvases are painted and sprayed symbols of abstracted and approximate forms and ideas. Sometimes there’s a disagreement between forms existing on different planes or heavy lines delineating shadow beyond the scope of logic that collide with her astute nod to the ‘graffic’ aesthetic. This dissent on the surface of the picture makes for weird, mesmerizing and exciting works that are big enough to hold a wall and yet they demand your attention to come closer to view.
Her technique is sharp and speckled, formulaic and free form. The works trigger a moment of familiarity that dupes you into thinking you understand what you’re seeing, only to shift gears into that terrain of life territory that is simultaneously mutable and arbitrary. Not unlike a story of days, the works form, take a direction and roll out. Something happens along the way and it's best to pay attention as the journey holds the heart. With titles that point out that direction; Illustration, Stone Tablet (with detail), Puzzle Painting and Monologue, McAdams deftly tells a compellingly rich and strange story through histories of geometric abstraction and minimal painting.
-EZ, 2014
Deirdre McAdams is a visual artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2008), and the Victoria College of Art (2003), where she studied painting.
