RAE JOHNSON

Interiors

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 28th, 2- 6pm
Exhibition runs until: December 19th, 2015

Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, ON, 416 532 5566
The Christopher Cutts Gallery is delighted to present Interiors; an exhibition of new works by Rae Johnson.

In Interiors Johnson has turned back to working figuratively. Echoing the work that she created in the early 1980s, as one of the founding members of the artistic collective Chromazone. The exhibition includes a few works dating from that time.

Johnson’s works of the last two decades have been primarily landscape base. They are large format oil on panel, which emphasize the endless grandeur of the Canadian landscape.

However, after a rather daunting couple of years, where Johnson had lost a number of close colleagues and friends she began to have reflections of these losses. Johnson stated, “Following these losses which amplified other losses of loved ones, I began having dreams where it was as though I was visiting a kind of space where I would meet them again.  I don’t really believe in the supernatural per se, but these dreams couldn’t be ignored.   So I started drawing.  Drawing because I had become weary of all the razzle dazzle, corporate, pseudo academic painting swamping the art world.  I wanted to return to modest means – graphite on canvas – a means that could not hide behind grandiose technique but would exist barely – delicately and hardly there – seen in the mind of the viewer as much as through the material presentation of the images.”

This body of work has a haunting almost otherworldly quality. The majority of them are graphite on canvas with the exception of two paintings – Red Diner and Interior, chair, painting. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essay by Toronto author Ewan Whyte.