Laura Findlay | Tuff
2019 | LAURA FINDLAY
TUFF
MONTREAL
July 13 - Sep 7
Brista, 2017, Oil on panel, 17 x 19”
TUFF
July 13 - Sept 7, 2019
Opening: Jul 13, 2 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Galerie Division is pleased to present Tuff, a new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Laura Findlay.
Findlay has compared our increasingly fragmentary grasp of nature to the psychic fragmentation triggered by personal loss. In her earlier paintings of bats and sea life, she exploited the night sky and ocean floor for their foreboding darkness and disorientation. She also captured the wonder of discovering lost shards within these vast, impersonal expanses. As in those paintings, a sense of interiority pervades her new work. Assembled from myriad source images, and built up with palimpsests of paint, her volcanoes suggest the ravages of emotional trauma, as well as the gradual act of reconstituting meaning in the wake of crisis. Accreting like layers of volcanic scar tissue, her surfaces become metaphors for loss, healing, and regrowth.
Laura Findlay (b. 1984, Montreal QC) received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2014 and her BFA from Concordia University in 2011. Currently she lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Recent exhibitions include Tuff at Arsenal Contemporary in Toronto, Ontario (2019), Echo Locationsat Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario (2018), Vent at Evans Contemporary in Peterborough, Ontario (2018), Afire at Skylab Gallery in Columbus, Ohio (2018), Grounds at Brucebo Konstnärshemmet, Sweden (2017), Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move at The Kamloops Art Gallery (2017), Messengers at Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto (2017), and @--}--- at Lord Ludd, Philadelphia (2016). In 2017 she was the recipient of the Brucebo Fine Art Scholarship funding a four-month long residency and accompanying exhibition in Gotland, Sweden. She has also participated in independent self-directed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2016) and the Vermont Studio Center (2011).