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Leya Evelyn: It's Not What You Think
Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, Halifax
April 1 - May 29,2016
A member of Halifax's art community since she relocated from New York more than 30 years ago, Leya Evelyn has had a busy season, with an exhibition in Ottawa followed by this one at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery. In Halifax, she presented two distinct bodies of work, site-specific to each of the gallery's two spaces. Both are from the family tree of abstraction, but are distant cousins with differing aesthetics and scales.
In the gallery's main space are several large-scale oil paintings with subtle, muted colours: planes of buttercream and lightly toasted marshmallow are partitioned by lines and marks in other hues, such as ultramarine, aqua, emerald, forest and dusty purple. These solemn, calming works command the viewer to spend time looking, from afar and up close. The latter - from a standpoint within sniffing distance of the textured surfaces - rewards the viewer with sightings of fabric swatches beneath the palimpsest application of paints.
Evelyn's skill in layering these materials creates realms beyond the textured surfaces. In several paintings, swarms of scribbled brushwork hover above fields or seascapes of ochre-tinted cream, sometimes appearing to be reflected there and to exist on a plane other than the painting's. Similarly, the colours and forms in When, No. 2 push and pull, establishing spaces: a plane of milky lemon melts into cream at a sepia-toned horizon - perhaps...