Disrupted Pictures: Dyan Marie and Bill Marshall

OPENING RECEPTION: 18 March, 8 PM

Dyan Marie and Bill Marshall began their careers in the late 1970s when late-Modernist abstraction was under critical re-evaluation re-evaluation by younger artists who were also reinvestigating image making and the politics of postmodern representation. Both artists were on the frontlines of this resurgence but were also engaged with social and cultural issues in their urban neighbourhoods. Marie continues to be an urban activist in Toronto’s Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue district – an engagement that has deeply informed her current art practice. Marshall, however, relocated ten years ago to Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, after many years of fighting Vancouver’s exorbitant cost of living and experiencing a high degree of urban burnout. Now, after a few decades of living and making art in the world, both Marshall and Marie are making art of the world, enfolding their personal ‘worldviews’ into their art practices. Without returning to the strategies of 20th century modernist abstraction, they apply tools of abstraction to their use of representational images. They obliterate, overlay, blur, disrupt and further manipulate what they initially represent in pictorial space – informed by their social/political engagements with their environments, and within a cultural milieu now defined by digital technologies. Marshall still paints landscapes the old-fashioned way – with brush on canvas – but with a palette that quotes the unnatural glow of LED (light emitting diode) illumination and dotted overlays that suggest pixelation. Marie’s photo-based work, fully digital in its production, explores the tension between source images and their manipulations while quoting ‘still life’ painting in a very unstill, urban environment. In the process of presenting these two artists’ work together, an unusual reversal of expectation occurs. The picturesque Nova Scotian landscape, often portrayed as benign and unspoilt for tourism purposes, provides dark subject matter for Marshall’s depictions of contested territories in his Nova Scotia’s picturesque South Shore region that, for example, will see the destruction of fragile ecosystems due to commercial development. In contrast, Marie’s beleaguered urban context is infused with euphoric colour and energy in images that champion positive social climates within her stressed inner-city neighbourhood. Both Marshall and Marie are keenly aware of their surroundings and the dynamics of the forces of change – for better or worse. The transformations within both bodies of work, however, serve to focus attention on what is unaffected and comprehensible: the landscapes and the figures that endure.