Shirley Wiitasalo

Shirley Wiitasalo

4 May to 24 June 2017

Toronto, ON – opening on Thursday, 4 May from 6 to 8 p.m., and continuing through to 24 June 2017, Susan Hobbs Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Shirley Wiitasalo.

Shirley Wiitasalo’s most recent paintings have a characteristically reductive vocabulary. Since 2010, she has explored various methods of application, whereby paint from one surface is then transferred to the canvas. Here, the viscosity of paint performs a physical negotiation between two surfaces. Material and information is altered or lost through physical mediation to produce paintings that are a play between control and chance.

On the gallery’s first floor, the paintings are a study in variation as colours spread across six monochromes — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet. A continuation of her Distant series, each contains six spheres which could be positive or negatives spaces, apertures, ultra-magnified microscopic entities or moons orbiting a distant star. Upstairs, the paintings foregrounded blue image plane suggests subject matter as atmosphere, both present and absent. Wiitasalo’s method of transferring shifts the romance associated with the act of painting to one of pragmatism and recurrence. And yet, as a technical operation, transferring does not produce fixed predictable results. As philosopher Vilém Flusser explains, technical images are linked to an accidental, creative universe that is full of possibilities. Their task is “to produce improbable, informative situations to consolidate invisible possibilities into visible improbabilities.”