Kym Greeley – Common Occurrences

Christina Parker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Kym Greeley.

The exhibition will open June 21 and run until July 14 with an artist opening reception on June 21, from 5:30 – 8:00pm.

Kym Greeley is a St. John’s base painter who has had an exciting art practice for more than 22 years. Greeley studied art at the critically acclaimed Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Art and Science, exchange program, New York, USA in 1996 and graduated from NASCAD University, Halifax NS in 1997 with a major in Fine Art.

In her artistic practice Kym Greeley uses painting and printmaking to investigate how we move through the landscape. We are inundated by idealized representations of our province, particularly highly branded images deemed to be representative of traditional Newfoundland culture, such as fish, boats and icebergs. As a contemporary artist Greeley feels that this representation of the landscape is irreverent to its subject, which motivates her to create new visual stories about the land and how we move from point A to point B.

Common Occurrences examines how we view our landscape by placing the audience in the perspective of the tourist. We travel through our communities on a journey to find and take in a view from the optimum lookout. These lookouts are usually human-made spaces, forcing the traveler/viewer to see the community through a specific composition. Greeley’s work has always played with constrained compositions using the car windshield as a compositional tool, similar to how we use our screens on tablets or mobile phones as a way to view our virtual world from a fixed and limited perspective.

“I am compelled by the irony of these ubiquitous viewpoints. These “optimum” views are the most mundane and removed way to see the landscape of the communities we visit. We rarely leave the experience of the car to walk down paths or through rugged woods. We are satisfied with the disconnect of being on the land. I like to contemplate the disconnect between the real or lived experiences versus the virtual or artificial spaces.”

Are the lookout stops practical? Are the lookouts allowing us to actually experience the land that we live on, or are they merely used as stopping points for us to check our phones and take a snapshot to prove our visitation?

Greeley’s technical process includes traveling and documenting through photography. She uses this exploration as the starting point to create drawings.

“I use the initial images as a guide and move through a process of elimination and simplification. I pare down images and carefully consider color to determine tone and feeling, creating a minimal image that reduces sentimentality. I push and pull depth by omitting and adding color in order to play with illusion, flattering the picture frame and challenging the traditional reading of these viewpoints.”

Work by Kym Greeley has been featured in prominent curated group exhibitions across Canada including the Painting Project, Galerie de l’UQAM, Quebec, 2013, the McMichael Gallery, Kleinberg, Ontario, 2014, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, St. John’s 2015, 2016, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Point Claire Quebec, 2017 and the 57^th edition of the Venice Biennale, 2017.

Publications such as The Painting Project, Folklore and Other Panics, Canadian Art Magazine, Visual arts News have featured articles about her critical art practice. Greeley’s work is found in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, Global Affairs Canada, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the provincial art bank as well as in many corporate and private collections across Canada, the United States and Germany.