Alison Shields ‘A Stranger Loop’
Alison Shields, A strange loop PY6, 2011, oil on canvas, 48" x 72"
A Stranger Loop
by Alison Shields
Opening Reception Thursday, January 5th, 2012 7-10 pm
January 5 – February 4, 2012
The Gam Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by recent MFA graduate Alison Shields, entitled A Stranger Loop. In the first presentation of her thesis work in Western Canada, Shields explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself. This exhibition will include new paintings as well as an expanded archive of tracings.
Alison Shields is a painter who began her art career in Vancouver. She received a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA at the University of Waterloo.
