On a bright summer day, the trek across town to Boarding House Gallery on Dublin Street involved the typical scenery: red-brick houses, porches with peeling paint, pathways, and lush green lawns and leaves. These sights were similar to the subject matter presented in Jennifer Carvalho’s solo MFA thesis exhibition Long Take, which used the mundane as inspiration and through the medium of paint, presented familiar images with a twist.
The exhibition includes paintings of nature and forgotten, mundane spaces in a photorealistic style, but also features painterly techniques such as dripping paint, broad brushstrokes and thickly and thinly applied paint to create interest. At first glance, the pieces appear similar to images one might capture with a camera, but a closer inspection reveals how each scene is altered by the artist’s hand.
“With my work, I’m usually looking to spaces that are overlooked: you know, the seemingly uneventful spaces of lived experience, and … I’m interested in representational systems and how that information can then break down into painted mark,” Carvalho said. Through paint application, the surface of the canvas encourages an experience of close looking, “where you’re drawn to look at these things that you would otherwise not look at or not notice, necessarily,” Carvalho said.
Steps, paths and walkways, all empty and seemingly neglected spaces, seem to be a recurring motif throughout the collection of paintings.
Carvalho works from photographs, and though the images may seem akin to casual snapshots of everyday scenes, composing images is a deliberate practice that requires a critical eye. Carvalho explored her surroundings with a camera, while paying attention to details such as light hitting the side of a building, or the colour of brick at a certain time of day. These sites were then framed through the camera’s lens, and later, further cropped to fit the canvas. The photographic aspect of Carvalho’s practice provides an opportunity to reflect upon temporality, and how time can be represented within a given medium.
“I’m interested in allowing my reference to photography show in the painting. So I don’t try and hide that I work from photographs.” Carvalho is interested in the way a photograph captures an instant in time, and how this can be further explored through the process of painting.
“It’s an instant in time that I’m stretching out through the act of painting, and revisiting this one instant over the period of a couple weeks to a month. And so then that time […] becomes visible through the marks on the canvas and the different passages,” Carvalho said.
These temporal elements refer back to the title of the exhibit; Long Take is a cinematic term, referring to an uninterrupted shot in a film that lasts much longer than the conventional pace of film, used for dramatic or narrative effect. “A lot of my research interests are concerned with the long take in cinema. And the long take is a temporal cinematic device that is about duration, so it points back to my interest in time,” said Carvalho.
Ultimately, Long Take highlights the tension between the immediacy of sight, and the deliberate and time-consuming act of looking.