Jean Jewer
Tuesday May 10th, 2011 to
Sunday May 29th, 2011
Vernissage:
Sun May 15th, 2011 — 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Artist's Talk with Q&A's: Thursday, May 19, 7-8pmJean Jewer comes from the edge of the world.
...A fisherman’s daughter, she grew up in Main Brook, a remote village on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, where she watched gigantic icebergs float by, and wind and water whip and carve the land. Her abstract paintings testify to a first-hand experience of the raw energy, violence and beauty of Eastern Canada’s coastal landscape. Jewer writes that she feels “a visceral connection to the sublime drama of land and sea.”
The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that a sublime experience (upon seeing "the dark tempestuous ocean," for instance) evokes "a momentary check to the vital forces," an intuition of limitlessness that can never be adequately expressed in words or visual representations. Jewer's abstractions draw us close to such stunned awe, where language fails to grasp our experience, but the awing high tide always retreats for a low ebb that reveals a ground (however unstable) in the tangibility of paint.
After ebb tide, high tide floods back in, and knowing is undone; she paints a Whoosh (2008) a sudden gust of wind, in which we lose our footing. In forceful gestures, flowing fields and violent marks, the artist creates a zone of wordless, formless intuition, in which we sense that we are of nature. In Jewer’s own words: “This splattering liquid [of paint] resembles nature’s elements in the way that it flows, gushes, drips, and pours. These same features seem to parallel the way I make art. My paintings emerge like an act of nature: in an emotionally charged moment, I pick, I scrape, I slash, I mark my surfaces.”
From: Petra Halkes, “The Ebb and Flow of Language” exhibition essay for the exhibition, Whoosh, Jean Jewer, at Karsh Masson Gallery, Ottawa, November 19, 2010 to January 9, 2011.
