Sky Vessels/Mount Analog

This two person exhibition features new paintings by Montreal-based artist Jennifer Dorner and Vancouver-based artist Stephanie Aitken. Jennifer Dorner's work, Sky Vessels, is influenced by a variety of mediums, social spaces, and everyday life. Key concepts include artifice and display and how these can create atmospheric space within painting. As a juncture, the small and detailed representation of leisure activity combined with transport vehicles acts as the catalyst for disrupting the painting field. The use of humour - the uncanny - within the pictorial narrative introduces a subtle, but complex compositional language. In this series of paintings, Dorner is building an artificial sky, panel by panel with miniscule elements that highlight the bizarre attributes of leisure activities emblematic of western culture.

Stephanie Aitken's Mount Analog, is a series of recent paintings created on raw linen. These paintings are of mountains referencing the sublime of romantic landscape painting while challenging pictorial illusion.  Often using dripping and a viscous application of paint and medium, Aitken explores the unstable physicality of the mountains and reflects on the current and possibly well-founded, anxiety about potential catastrophic events, an insecurity reminiscent of Ruskin and the late romantics and their projections onto the landscape of anxieties about God’s apocalyptic intentions.  Maintaining qualities of their source images, mainly scenic photographs, Aitken is interested in the subjective criteria employed in the selection of events and phenomenon as subjects.