Instagram Live Reception: Friday, September 4, 6-7 pm
Show Runs: September 4 - October 4
Location: Studio Sixty Six, 858 Bank Street, Suite 101
https://www.instagram.com/studiosixtysix/
Click here to see the exhibition catalogue
What do the photographer and the painter have in common? Photographer Barbara Brown and abstract painter Daniel Sharp maintain separate studios and practices that do not overlap, yet, there are similarities and coincidences between their works. These two practicing visual artists have been life partners for the past 30 years. It is intriguing to view their works side by side. Their artworks seem to cross over at certain points and ‘talk’ to each other in a dialogue of light, colour, and organic forms.
Brown uses photography to capture compositions she creates using natural materials from her local environment. The plants and flowers she selects are both the subjects and mediums of her complex compositions. These compositions represent particular gardens, seasons, or natural environments. Brown seeks to create immersive images that refer back to the experience of being in a garden or forest. She is interested in breaking down the barriers between subject and object in nature. In her work, Brown negotiates an ancient relational way of being in the world.
Sharp paints compositions that he describes as proto-poetic abstractions. He sees these gestures as utterances of thoughts and feelings sequenced into visual essays, prior to linguistic descriptions or writing. His works are fairly simplified abstract paintings, something like an early stage of expression, analogous in some ways to a poem or a song. He is interested in the impulsive and unmediated gesture, balanced with a constructed, composed structure. He strives for deep colour, the dynamism of forms, and the soft nuances of a composition.
Brown has looked towards abstract expressionist painting for compositional clues similar to Sharp's use of photography as a research tool to see the world.
