RANDALL STEEVES : S O M A
JUNE 5 - 20
Elissa Cristall Gallery
2239 Granville Street, Vancouver BC
Randall Steeves' ('88) thickly painted, textured paintings invite the viewer to reconsider the gesture of painting itself. The canvases explore the relationship between the photographic index and the painterly trace with a wry nod towards conceptual art practice.
The exhibition features six paintings, all of which have been completed over the last two years. The
subject of the canvases is the fingerprint. Steeves had himself
"processed" by the Vancouver Police Department in preparation for this
work and the pieces are made up entirely of his own prints.
The
paintings are all made from encaustic, a beeswax based paint that is
heated and brushed onto the canvas where it hardens immediately. The
process results in a complex surface that can be read as a chronology of
the painting's construction and as a record of the painter's physical
presence and actions. The physicality of the paintings is reinforced by
the fingerprint imagery. For Steeves, the fingerprint is "a metaphor for
painting... for what I'm doing when I'm making paintings, and what
we're doing when we look at paintings. It's about the examination and
categorization of human marks, of the traces we all leave behind.
Painting can be thought of in similar terms."
Randall Steeves was born
in Saint John, New Brunswick. He studied at Mount Allison and received an MFA from the University of Victoria,
Victoria, BC. Since then he has been based in the Vancouver area. He has
lectured and led workshops at art galleries, colleges and universities
across Western Canada and has exhibited his work internationally.
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