OPENING | CONTRARIETIES & COUNTERPOINTS

Exhibition organized and circulated by Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, Ontario

The visually rich spaces in Ottawa artist Melanie Authier’s paintings remind us that we are still negotiating a myriad of questions when we consider art after Modernism. For Authier, paintings are not simply discrete aesthetic objects. They exist within an expanded set of relations. The intermingling of styles in each painting engenders a liminal quality that is at once intelligible yet elusive, playing with competing histories hard-edge and gestural abstraction. Contrarieties & Counterpoints brings together recent works on canvas and paper by Authier, where she addresses the challenges posed by freighted histories of painterly practices head on.