Mel Gausden | Girls Gone Wild

Mel Gausden | Girls Gone Wild
January 13-27, 2018
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Canadian landscape painting has mythologized the great outdoors through the work of Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson and David Milne. Emerging artist Mel Gausden marks a departure from the Canadian landscape tradition—a genre historically dominated by male painters—by centralizing the experience of women in nature, and her own in Girls Gone Wild, the artist's inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver.

Typically overlooked in traditional landscape painting, Gausden's canvases feature women as outdoors people: active participants who build fires, climb fences, and carry their own canoes. Her female subjects, often situated or leaving evidence of their trace, discover themselves within the natural environment in which they gather, explore and commune.

The visual culture of our contemporary digital age informs Gausden's unconventional palette. Neon silhouettes and brightly hued accents take reference from pre-set Instagram camera filters, fashion and consumer trends. The artist's manipulation of oil paint varies from sculptural— bending and piling thick layers of paint into matchsticks of textured impasto—to painterly— diluting paint until it drips with controlled precision— to sketchlike with her mark-making. For Gausden, the act of painting is intuitive as much as it is intentional; an exploratory act of personal and cultural identity which fuses past and present influences to create new possibilities for representation.