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Kathy Dain at Peak Gallery
The fact that Brantford, Ont.-based artist Kathy Dain's new paintings
-- exhibited under the title Plain Song -- are made up of hundreds of
small, painted, nipple-like bumps of wood arranged in close-packed formation
on grounds of a different colour might not fire your imagination. These
are exceedingly cunning paintings, however, and a great deal more than
the sum of their descriptions.
Dain's little wooden bumps (the artist calls them "domes" and
figures there are 2,912 of them per work, or 41,000 for the whole show)
are arranged in subtle patterns that are eventually discernible, if you
squint your eyes and relax. The domes are painted so that they bear a
residual colour fraying out from their ostensible colour. This makes the
viewing of Dain's dotted panels a lot more absorbing than it would be
otherwise.
Each of her paintings is a diptych -- with coloured panel juxtaposed to
colour panel: green and white, red and violet, and so on -- which further
complicates what first seem to be dismayingly ingenuous paintings. And,
of course, her paintings are enormously labour-intensive. "Everything
I make involves acts of repetition that can take months," Dain writes
in her gallery statement. "It is sometimes boring, often exhausting,
and ultimately meditative," a sequence of states, she says, that
keeps her "centred and content." And you can see how it would.
$6,800 each. Until July 16, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
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