M.E. Sparks

Strategies of masking, blocking and obstructing come to the fore in the paintings of Vancouver-based artist M.E. Sparks—and in this way, her canvases call attention to longstanding power dynamics around looking and seeing. Sparks, who was also a finalist in the 2016 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, has stated that in her approach to art she “look[s] for ways to subvert representational modes of painting to both reveal and call in to question our desire to name what we see,” noting that a desire to see and to name can be linked, ultimately, to a desire to possess. Sparks graduated with an MAA from Emily Carr University in 2016 and completed her BFA at NSCAD University in 2013. Recently, she was also a recipient of the Nancy Petry Award and was selected for residencies in Berlin and Hämeenkyrö.

Angela Teng

In her intensive and innovative studio process, Vancouver artist Angela Teng engages in the project of, as she puts it, “renegotiating how a picture can be made.” Of late, for Teng, this has included several techniques: drying acrylic paint into long strips, which are then crocheted into wall works; coating parts of painted canvases with vibrant flocking material; extruding paint through canvases of crocheted string; and removing acrylic from thickly painted canvases to reveal soft layers beneath. Teng, who was also a finalist in the 2016 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, received her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2011. And her work, while speaking strongly to materials, also touches upon questions of painting and craft, gender and power. From hard-edge abstraction, minimalism and colour-field painting to feminist performance, quilting patterns and folk sculpture, Teng’s paintings incorporate many different movements into memorable, palpably assertive objects.

Tristan Unrau

“In many ways I paint in opposition to the idea that the artist must contain a specific voice. A painting contains its own style, but why should the painter?” So states Los Angeles–based Canadian artist Tristan Unrau, whose subject matter ranges from filmic nuns (as in Nun, After Pasolini, above) to Amsterdam office buildings to a crocodile crying salty tears—and whose approach could be read, across different canvases, as varying from photorealistic to fauvist to abstract. Unrau, who was also a finalist in the 2015 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, recently graduated from the MFA program at UCLA and received his BFA from Emily Carr University in 2012. Even in this day and age, the many possibilities in painting still appeal to this artist. “Painting can be a way of thinking,” he states. “To paint is a kind of telling, and you can do all sorts of things with that.”

With files from Canadian Art.