Imagine a paint drop that falls through space and suddenly freezes, stopping all physical and chemical processes and forming a perfect balance where time is suspended and matter is protected from deterioration.  This imagery best describes Chris Dorosz’s new series of sculptural paintings that are composed of paint drops suspended within a grid of clear vertical rods.  As the viewer’s eye travels across the pixel-like drops, full body forms materialize and dematerialize while scenes that are clear one moment disappear the next. 

The simple and physical idea of a paint drop is that it is shaped not by a brush or gesture but purely by its own viscosity and the air through which it falls. It’s no stretch to compare the drops to pixels or DNA, the microscopic strands that make up the human body. While Dorosz’s scenes depict everyman  — "On The Campaign Trail," "The Valley Girls," or "Fighting a Rising Tide"  — each portrait represents a moment preserved in time by the tenuous wires that hold it together. Chris Dorosz underscores the fluid nature of human physicality.  What you see is not always what you get.

Michel Daigneault puts it this way: Shapes, surfaces and colours are coded to act narratively, which allows them to converge and mutate into new identities.  Sylvie Bouchard speaks of making the architecture, nature and the human figure in her paintings both explicit and abstruse; they appear to tell us everything while revealing nothing.  Perhaps Jennifer Gordon puts it best: the paintings leave the facts behind.  She applies just enough pressure to get a painting to ‘skip out’ and shake off its normative bounds.

Each of the painters in this show is concerned with undermining our expectations.  They make connections and then interfere with them. Daigneault begins with landscape vistas and close-up views of rock formations, then incorporates them into topographic and mapping schematics. Upon closer inspection, Bouchard’s conventionally constructed reality is less substantial than its undertow.  She creates one reality in order to assert another, more internal one.  Jennifer Gordon, on the other hand, turns familiar things over and over so often they finally give in to their strangeness and appear on canvas as something new.

Each painter insists on abstraction while relying on a pictorial universe, addresses the viewer directly but maintains a disquieting distance.  Beyond a certain visual investment, the metaphors are ambiguous.  The paintings are at once empty and inhabited.  They draw attention to their fictions, yet teeter on implausibility.  As Jennifer Gordon states, dozens of identities slide and slip beneath the sun and hold still under a bulb.  If the painting is successful the viewer steps outside of his or her comfortable place and scale and temporarily leaves the reasonable ground of the quotidian behind.