Art School {Dismissed}: an exhibition in celebration of artists who teach
Curated by Heather Nicol
2010
Catalogue by Heather Nicol with contributions by Ian Carr-Harris, Yvonne Lammerich, Murray White, Jessica Vallentin
Moira Clark, "Walking Distance", oil on unstretched canvas, 40" x 156", 2010
Art School {Dismissed}
Walking Distance
I like maps and can spend a long time looking at them contemplating where things are, where people live and measuring the distances between places. They are abstracted landscapes and can be very beautiful. So in some ways maps are like paintings.
Walking Distance is a map of my neighbourhood and the boundaries shown are the general limit of my everyday life outside of (ironically, in light of this exhibition) my teaching assignments, which take me to St. Clair and Avenue Road and Spadina and Adelaide in Toronto and to Oakville, Ontario. Otherwise I walk or bicycle mainly within this particular locale. Many of my artist friends and my partner’s musician friends live within these boundaries and the art galleries and music venues where we exhibit our work are often here too. A musician friend refers to this area as The Meadow and I like this because it recalls the time before Toronto was divided up into a grid of streets. This region was a landscape of forests, farms and pastoral lands with meandering streams and marshes. The street where I live, Brookfield Street, was once a marshland and had a dairy on it.
In making this painting I started with a map and conformed the dimensions to fit the size of a bulletin board in Room 56A. I drew the streets freehand, using a very minimal grid system and then painted using colours derived from the bricks, roofs, siding and paint colours appearing on the houses and buildings of this Toronto vicinity. The streets are blue like the old waterways and the major roads are pink. The small green dots denote people and places I know in the neighbourhood.
The context of this work in relation to Art School {Dismissed} is that, first, it’s a painting and I teach painting. Second, it refers to an object (a map) that is often found in school classrooms. Third, the bulletin board to which it is installed is framed in woodwork that resembles a conventional painting frame hence the painting was made to fit the frame instead of the other way around. Walking Distance started with a map but there is none of the information that would normally be present such as street names or distance keys. I think of the piece as an abstract work that comes from a landscape origin. My abstract paintings often deal with grids and patterns that are drawn from various sources such as poetry, music, weaving and textiles, so the pattern/grid in a map presents a ready made composition that I can manipulate with colour.
Moira Clark – May 2010