Much of the previous work by current Quest University artist-in-residence Alison Shields is abstract but her latest work has gone back to representational painting.
In this case, she is examining art’s roots, specifically in the form of artists’ studios.
It wasn’t really a plan but instead grew out of research she has been conducting for her PhD dissertation at UBC. In fact, she admits hesitating about the idea at first, but ultimately found inspiration and began her series on these studios.
“This happened so quickly. This is the first time I’ve even had conversations about the work,” she said during Thursday night’s show, Studio Conversations, at Quest.
She spent the past couple years talking to artists from Victoria to Newfoundland about their studios, visiting more than 125 of them in these spaces, which rarely bare any resemblance to the Hollywood cliché of massive lofts where artists can create.
The process of talking with the artists eventually got her thinking about what happens when you make space for art.
When Shields went back to listen to the interviews, she was struck with the idea that she wanted to capture the images of the artists’ studios. She had taken photos, though that is not her medium, so she started to paint. “I’m not a photographer. That’s not the lens through which I see things,” she said.
Some of the paintings show the expected easels and paints. Others provide close-ups – for example, of little notes such as “Photography is dead.”
One artist in Saskatoon had a space where he could dip large sheets of copper into vats of paint. Another painted her studio a different colour every day, except for one long strip of tape, which revealed a multitude of striped colours in the end.
In the process of interviewing artists and creating her own paintings, Shields found the studio became a metaphor for many things, such as a portal or wormhole into other spaces, a stage, a playground, a lab, a waiting room, a brain and a web, among other things. These analogies are what she worked to capture in her paintings.
“These, for me, are just as much about the creativity of the artist as they are about the studios,” she said.
Shields hopes the series will grow to about 100 by next summer and she’s probably a little over a third of the way there. She created most of the paintings during her residency at Quest.
“It’s the most excited I’ve been about my painting in some time,” she said.
As well as Shields’ own work, Quest also displayed art created by her students during their recent class, pushed by the question of what art does.
Knowing many of the students had little or no background in art, she allowed them to explore. “I really designed a curriculum that lent itself to a variety of backgrounds,” Shields said.
For example, some looked into body issues as an influence on their painting. Others worked found-objects into sculptures or created collages.
“For me, a successful arts class is one where you come to the show and everything looks different,” she said.
