2022/2023 The trees weep, the mountain still, the bodies rust
Musée d'art de Joliette (February - May 2022)
Richmond Art Gallery (November 2022 - January 2023)
The Giants depicted in the exhibition are still. We witness them in various forms of rest, slumber, verticalness. They are horizon lines. They are the mountains. They are the trees. Peppered with painterly marks that suggest growths; rust, dandelions, weeds, pimples, moss. Their bodies overtaken by growth suggest time has passed. They are Giants observed in static sleep - in death? In failure. With death comes new beginnings. New timelines. The movement, shifts, pollination, and puss offer us multiple s/paces of growth occurring simultaneously. The Giant timeline, perhaps that of eternity, is both independent and dependant of the foliage that envelopes its body, as well as us. Time is only relevant as a counterpoint to our death and experience. The Giant might only be sleeping. Time and experience is a question of perspective. The Giant sleeping is akin to a horizon line in the distance. A Giant depicted sleeping suggests that it was tired (past) and that it will, eventually, awake (future).
A giant was once confused as a shelter by the greek god, Zeus. Is it not feasible that these giants are being mistaken for paintings? Or are these paintings being mistaken for giants? Can the subject (giant) also be the medium (giant)? But the medium is paint? As the story goes, Zeus thought the medium of the shelter was rock until he closely inspected the hard, cold edges of his surroundings and realized it was living tissue - alive, familiar. As though a magnifying lens was in front of him he saw his own flesh enlarged, engorged, every detail in depicted in the highest realism; every crease, every crevice to the scale of his own body. The medium of his shelter was not stone, brick or mortar. The medium was Giant. It was flesh. It was him. It was us.