JAMIE EVRARD | WILDERNESS YEAR

Jamie Evrard | Wilderness Year
March 13 – 27, 2021
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

In Wilderness Year, the latest exhibition by Vancouver-based painter Jamie Evrard, the artist traverses a new path on her return to the landscape genre.

Looking back on the experience of past travels, Evrard, informed by and moving away from earlier bodies of work, embraces the challenge of this source material to explore notions of wilderness both within the context of her subject matter and as it relates to the creative process itself. 

Over the course of a year spent in relative isolation, "wilderness" also came to represent "a bewildering situation" or "the state or quality of being solitary". Navigating this terrain, Evrard enacts a telling through the extension of her brush, to delve further into illusory depths of the picture space, and by extension her painting practice.

Evrard devises new techniques for her West Coast surroundings by layering her reference imagery and superimposing multiple compositions to evoke a visual exchange, a call and response between herself and the canvas. This gesture of resurfacing and overlaying traces the recall and elaboration of memory, and likewise echoes the natural movement of water reflections and old-growth canopies.

Interpreted through Evrard's hand, the soaring forests and rugged shorelines of the Pacific North West become new inspiration for mark-making and complex draftsmanship. Wilderness Year, offers an account of the artist's journey toward the realization of a singular vision.

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