KATRINA JURJANS

I am at the very early stages of exploring how my painting practice can merge with a spatial installation practice. This interest comes from the desire to explore how concepts inherent to my painting practice might become reconfigured as they shift from flat, pictorial representation into the temporal and spatial realm of a more immersive installation. This transition is not an abandonment of traditional, two-dimensional painting, but instead an exploration on how to incorporate my painting practice, both materially and conceptually, into a more spatial, artistic practice.

work in progress explorations:

slow frame

In the ten years that I have lived between the cities of Toronto and Montreal, I have travelled along the 401 highway more times than I can count. The highway has always felt like a space between destinations. An infinite, seemingly characterless expanse, save for a small stretch almost right in the middle, where the landscape briefly changes into rocky cliffs and small hills. More often than not, I am driving alone; listening to music or podcasts. Sometimes lost in a train of thought or emotional episode. Immersed in the interior world of my car and detached from the exterior world passing by me, time is measured in the length of an album or stop for food and gas.

A preliminary exploration, this project seeks to establish a different relationship to the highway by deliberately breaking up its monotonous expanse through two short site visits. The first, on the shoulder of the highway, somewhere between the cities of Belleville and Colborne, and about a 2 hour drive east of Toronto. Nowhere of particular importance, a place that only became “somewhere” because I decided to pull over. The second, a lookout spot off of the 100 island parkway, south of the 401. A place more frequented, close to the water. I documented both spaces through photos, sound recordings, videos and picking foliage, some of which has been incorporated into this project. Each space had its own unique characteristics; the loudness of speeding cars and trucks in the first, water and sound of geese in the second, but for me they shared the characteristic of disrupting the banality of the drive, often experienced as a sort of detached timelessness, through framing a specific moment. In their simplicity, these short site visits became a way to think about framing as a device that sets up a relationship, a way to delineate both space and time and disrupt the otherwise continuous flow. What relationship is being created through the act of delineating?

painting/installation presented at solo exhibition momentarily i take the shape of a flower