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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Admission always free

Today's hours
12 pm - 6 pm
ArchiveExhibition
10 Jul 99until21 Aug 99

Janet Werner

Trust

555 Hamilton St

A painted portrait on canvas depicting a person wearing a yellow T-shirt on a light blue background.

Janet Werner lives and works in Saskatoon and has exhibited widely across Canada. During the past decade, her work consisted of series of small paintings depicting icons of everyday life rendered in a style that played between abstraction and figuration and installed salon-style.

The paintings in the exhibition Trust mark a shift in direction for Werner. By exploring the painted portrait, she works with a genre that receives little acknowledgement in contemporary art, and which is often deemed exhausted in a world dominated by photographic and digital imagery. While clearly referencing the history of this genre, her intentions depart from it. Werner's portraits are not of actual individuals, but are composed of half-remembered, half-imagined faces. Staring outward into space, these subjects suggest inward psychological states of consciousness. And by employing characteristics that are hauntingly familiar, Werner strives to create portraits that are convincing as a representation of persona. Coupled with her interest in making portraits is an interest in the formal issues. The use of strong monochromatic backgrounds, for example, brings into play a relationship between abstraction and representation. As such, these portraits are as much about the process of painting and looking, as they are about the representation of people.

Biography

Janet Werner was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and studied in Toronto, Banff and Baltimore before completing her MFA at Yale University in New Haven. Werner is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art History at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Janet Werner is represented by the Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary and the Robert Birch Gallery, Toronto.