Monica Tap addresses the landscape with contemporary edge
With a trend in recent years towards abstract painting in the contemporary art world, it’s easy to forget that landscapes have captivated artists for centuries, and continue to be a source of inspiration today. One of three shows that opened at Macdonald Stewart Art Centre on Jan. 23, “Monica Tap: the pace of days” explores the boundaries between landscape and abstraction, and is informed by the history of painting practices. Tap gave a guided tour and spoke about the exhibit on the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 28.
The exhibit features the artist’s work from the last 15 years, with an emphasis on vibrant new paintings. Tap, who is also an Associate Professor in Guelph’s School of Fine Art and Music, was initially interested in boundaries between drawing and painting, and referenced other artist’s landscape drawings as sources for early paintings.
Tap later lived in Holland to complete a residency, and while she was away she reconnected with her Canadian identity, and began to question her use of the Dutch masters, such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt, as inspiration for her own work. Tap realized that these artists had drawn from their own lives and surroundings, and this spurred her to shift her focus.
Tap started using video footage of landscapes shot out of moving vehicles she had captured on digital cameras while traveling. Tap extracted stills from these videos to use as references for paintings, which became the “One-second Hudson” series.
“I extracted several stills from a single second […] so there was lots of detail missing, and I liked that – the poorer the image, the better the painting, I thought,” said Tap. “The camera has no inherent pictorial intelligence. The camera just records; it just captures what goes by.”
Translating across the boundaries of one medium to another was a challenge, Tap explained: “Video is a moving image, and painting is a still image, and that became an area of some exploration for me.” Tap also noted that she was painting images she hadn’t actually seen or experienced firsthand, but had merely glimpsed through a window and recorded with her camera.
The newest works in the exhibit (and the series from which the exhibit draws its name) are derived from Tap’s experience on a 32-day trek on the ancient pilgrim route from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Tap paused every hour to record a photograph of the road ahead and the road behind. She then selected one pair of images per day and created small-scale paintings from these photographs, invoking concerns of time, memory and the intimate connection between people and their natural surroundings.
“Monica Tap: the pace of days” contains lush and vibrant paintings with contemporary appeal, while drawing on the conventions of the traditional landscape and abstraction. The paintings, far from static pictorial representations, provide glimpses into how technology (from digital video to cameras) mediates our experience of the natural world around us. Tap has developed a dynamic painting practice that is both of the landscape and beyond.
“Monica Tap: the pace of days” runs at MSAC from Jan. 23 to April 6, 2014.