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Alexandra Flood is the most recent artist to join Studio Sixty Six. She moved to Ottawa in 2019 after spending 8 years overseas in England. Her practice is deeply rooted in materiality and emotion with her canvases identified by their bright colours, fluid brushstrokes and dark moments of quiet.
Your work is very abstract and materially driven. Can you tell us about your process?
When do you feel like a piece is finished?
I don’t go into the studio with premeditated plans or sketches. The free fall I have in the studio is most apparent when I just go in there and rip into the surface of a canvas in bursts, not questioning the un-interrupted stream of consciousness flowing through the medium. I spend a great deal of time looking intensely at a canvas to get a sense of how it's evolving, then I pull out shapes which can evoke anything from landscape, eyes and mouths, to structural forms inherent in the mark of man on the earth. I know a painting is finished when I feel it in my gut.
Your paintings often have a large black negative space in them. Does this imagery have particular meaning for you?
My swaths of darkness are always tinted heavily with luminously pigmented colours that ignite their effect as a depth rather than a blackened area. To me these spots of dark depth evoke a feeling of a void, the unknown, a quiet spot for the viewer to park their mind and ponder before moving on to the more punchy spots in my compositions.
How do you feel like your paintings in Can’t Do Nights fits in with the work its shown alongside? What pieces do you think your paintings connect strongest with?
There is a thread of vibrant color in many artworks shown throughout Can’t Do Nights, and I especially enjoy the way my paintings Swoosh and Daughter Particle communicate with the sublime abstraction of Dan Sharp’s small paintings on the opposite wall.
You are scheduled to be in a group show this spring at Studio Sixty Six with Andrew Morrow and Atticus Gordon. What are you most excited about in showing with these two painters? What narratives do you see emerging between your practices?
Being new to the Ottawa art scene, I am really thrilled to be in such good company for a three person painting show at Studio Sixty Six in May! I look forward to seeing all our new work together and how the three voices will have dialogue with one another, a baseline that is a love of mark making in oil and acrylic. I see a sliding scale of thought process that begins on one end with Andrew’s figuratively based ideas, threading in with Atticus’s fractural narratives which reference the figure and ease into abstraction. My work is on the other end of the scale, holding a more entropic outlook, whilst moving shapes that can echo the body and spaces, moments.
July 8 - August 27
Figure Figure is a group exhibition by Studio Sixty Six artists whose creative production methods explore the contemporary figure.
September 2 to October 22, 2022Public Reception: September 16, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
View the Exhibition Catalogue here
September 3 to October 10, 2021 Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) was born in Copenhagen and lived there his entire life. His oeuvre consists of...
March 11 to April 30, 2022Public Reception: March 18, 2022, 6pm to 8pm View the Exhibition Catalogue here Studio Sixty Six is proud to present...