Moon_Line_Sun, 2017
Screenprint
55.8 x 50.8 cm, edition of 30
unframed
This Artist Edition was created by Elizabeth McIntosh specifically for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Artist Edition program in relation to her participation in the exhibition Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting on view at the Gallery from September 30, 2017 to January 1, 2018.
McIntosh is a Vancouver-based artist who has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and emerged as a leading figure in contemporary painting. Moon_Line_Sun represents one of just a few screenprints she has created to date and is closely linked to her painting practice. In Moon_Line_Sun, three imprecise shapes with painterly edges hover on a pink ground evoking the titular subjects. A dark diagonal line bisects the picture plane and appears to squeeze the rounded yellow form right to the edge of the image. The striking use of orange and yellow draws the viewer’s eye around the image negotiating the interplay between these shapes so that the picture is not easily resolved.
While McIntosh resists the term, her course of investigation is technically and theoretically linked to abstraction, putting her in line with local and international cycles of abstraction extending from 1950s modernism to post-conceptual material practice. McIntosh’s work considers the formal properties of abstraction through a distinctive visualization that takes shape through a lengthy process of layering wherein each successive layer represents the pursuit of a more interesting painting. Questions of colour and composition are continuously reconsidered. At the core of McIntosh’s practice is an emphasis on indeterminacy and doubt as significant factors in artistic practice, analysis and interpretation.
Elizabeth McIntosh (b. 1967 Simcoe, ON) has exhibited her work extensively including recently in solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2010), Division Gallery, Montréal (2012), Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2012, 2014, 2016), CANADA, New York (2016) and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2012), Logan Center, University of Chicago, Chicago (2014) and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016, 2017). Her works are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is an influential professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.