Over the past sixty years or so, artists have sought to merge easel painting and its secondary support, the wall, in many ways. Indeed the whole gallery, or “white cube,” has been engaged, questioned, and at times, dramatically altered. Artists have created “wall works”; stridently temporary installations that extend the reach of painting to an architectural scale, physically occupying the viewer’s entire visual field and illusionistically unsettling the gallery architecture. Painting has been placed in conversation with sculpture and space—it may serve as applied relief on the wall, lean against or even break through the wall—in order to intensify physical presence and pictorial illusion. Artists have combined painting with other visual forms such as still photography, projection, performance, and text—again, associations that seek to expand and confound the language of painting.

In creating an experimental exhibition that reflects the diversity evident in contemporary Canadian painting, I thought I might draw on recent painting installation practices in order to avoid some of the problems group exhibitions often present. Paintings are conventionally rendered on a textile support stretched over a rectilinear frame, and a curatorial selection of paintings, even by markedly divergent artists, runs the risk of being undermined by this shared format. The similarities can subtly skew an individuation of each artist’s work. My answer to this potential dilemma was to invite artists to make paintings that, through a variety of formats, physically and conceptually engage the Blackwood Gallery’s two exhibition spaces and the multiple contexts of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s suburban campus.

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