Past Exhibition

Art on Demand 3.2

Artists Andrew Booth, Paige Caldwell & Amanda Vergara and Curated by Christina Billingham
Mar 23, 2017
to
May 07, 2017
EXHIBITION

Fragmented Self is a selection of work by Fraser Valley artists Andrew Booth (Abbotsford), Paige Caldwell (Langley), and Amanda Vergara (Maple Ridge).

Andrew Booth uses oil paint to create abstracted portraits. Bold, gestural strokes eliminate facial features in the artist’s bust forms. Booth, who does not work from models or photographs but defers to visual memory, seeks to communicate what he calls “emotional fluency” which he defines as authentic emotion without judgment or attachment. Unlike conventional portraits these paintings are not intended to capture specific likenesses, and instead suggest something more general about the dissociative impacts of contemporary culture.

Paige Caldwell’s works are characterized by disfiguration. Like Booth, Caldwell’s works are rooted in the human form, yet her focus is on mutated figures. Caldwell’s figures are composed of geometric shapes, distorted proportions and exaggerated angles, and created from unrefined materials like unfinished wood and charcoal. Oscillating between over-life-sized studies and diminutive sketches, conventional physical representation is replaced by specters of the human body that are equally compelling and troubling.

Amanda Vergara’s photographs likewise challenge notions of beauty. In the artist’s Blinded by Beauty series, the sitters include models and the artist herself. Vergara has emphasized facial features typically associated with feminine beauty: long eye lashes, big lips, carefully defined eyebrows. Using a gelatinous mold-making medium called alginate, she obscures portions of the models faces. These photographs have been carefully crafted to reflect beauty standards that are easily commodified and overtly sexualized, yet Vergara repeatedly interferes with our ability to consume these images as objects of pure pleasure.

Though disparate, the artists’ respective depictions of the human form speak to a collective desire to disrupt our expectations of figurative representation. By challenging the certitude of recognizable human features, they present us with a discomforting critique of the physical ideal.

The Reach Art on Demand 3.2 Monograph

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