Sheila Kernan | Forever Is A Feeling
Sheila Kernan | Forever Is A Feeling
August 10-24, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 10, 2019, 2-4 PM, Artist in Attendance
Forever Is A Feeling marks emerging Calgary-based painter Sheila Kernan's inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver. Known for her intensely saturated palette and tactile surfaces, Kernan's meticulously composed images begin with large-scale drawings and photo-montages drawn from references collected over a ten-year span and comprise skillfully layered mixed-media elements and gestural impasto.
In Forever Is A Feeling, Kernan remarks on time — its inevitable passage and the myriad ways in which we keep it— and memory, in its capacity as living record and capricious witness. Kernan's engagement with these themes emerge through her practice in various ways: her preparatory collages become disparate visual memories, rearranged piecemeal; the gradual accumulation, blending and erasing of her dry brush technique echo acts of forgetting and remembrance, while her intricate hand-cut stencils and their graphic forms evoke the omitting and softening effects of recollection.
Mediated by the artist's lived experience, distinct sensibility, and richly complex process, Kernan's re-imagining of the Canadian landscape as a constructed space is informed by our collective conception of the genre and its source material, taking on new and richer depths of meaning with the act of viewing. Through interactions with her personal history, Kernan endeavors to fix the fleeting instant and the sense of infinitude captured within it by rendering tangible, immutable paintings which invoke those singular moments in time.