Katrina graduated from Concordia University in 2014 with a BFA in Art History and Studio Art. Always an avid painter, her most recent work blurs the lines between memories, emotions and dreams – placing figures in surreal landscapes that are intimately connected to this world while simultaneously departing away from it. At the 2017 Toronto Outdoor Art Show, she was awarded both the Best of Painting and Best of Student awards, with the later affording the opportunity to partake in an artist residency at Gibraltar Point in the summer of 2018. She has participated in both group and solo exhibitions in Canada and internationally.
Statement
In my last years of studies, I became increasingly fascinated with spatial theory and in particular spaces of transition and notions of ephemerality, memory, transformation and emotionality. Manifesting in various forms throughout the years, these ideas have been brought to the conceptual forefront of my painting practice, where they have been solidified into the visual language of pattern, layering, colour and spatial tension.
Creating poetic narrative heavy with symbolism – where flowers embody feelings of absence and growth and rain clouds communicate intense emotion, I am interested in the power of analogies to tap in to the feelings we all experience. Shifting into the surreal, the depicted scenes – intimate, often nostalgic and heavy – are anchored to this world while simultaneously departing away from it. Sometimes flesh and blood, other times ghostly outlines, the figures I paint exist between somewhere real and imagined. While remaining evocative through gesture and expression, they are in a sense anonymous, representing emotions and memories rather than specific people.
In dream-like compositions, where patterns and colours fluctuate between foreground and background, I aim to challenge perceptual conventions of time and space. As a backdrop of floral wallpaper becomes the textile patterns of a woman’s blouse, or intricate dot patterns move from the sky into the eyes of a figure, the world presents itself as a continuously shifting and reshaping entity, often existing in many places at once. This notion is further strengthened by peripheral framing on the canvas’ edge, which acts as a visual marker between varying temporal and spatial realms. Concurrently, as I push patterns right to the edge of the canvas, my aim is to ignore conventions of framing as something that contains, but instead intersects through, and by doing so, play with the idea that the painting could in fact expand out infinitely, continuously undergoing transformations as it unfolds.
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