A Place in the Country

MKG127,

Toronto, ON

March 16 - April 13, 2019

In A Place in the Country, Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology and memory. These new paintings are arrangements assembled from various fragments: outtakes from painting’s history, elements from her own snapshots, colour notes, memory. Each painting is both an invention and a response to a place that she knows and has recorded. She is interested in how location or landscape can trigger memory; akin to how painting readily conjures its own past. This history reveals how aesthetics, among other factors, have operated to tame nature into landscape, and the artifice and assumptions underlying this error.

Artist's statement:

A Place in the Country borrows its title from W.G. Sebald’s collection of essays, in which he traces his own affinities with artists and writers of the past. I take a similar approach in these paintings, weaving fragments of other painters’ work—Bonnard, Frankenthaler, Morandi, Dodd, Milne, Carr, Redon, Kirkeby—into images rooted in a specific place, in this case, a lush and painterly Rhododendron Garden in Bremen, Germany, which I photographed extensively one evening in 2017.

Like Sebald’s essays, these paintings are a way of mapping admiration and influence. A partial tree from one artist, a colour from another, or a remembered snapshot detail enters the garden, where these disparate elements jostle for space, share the ground, and grow into something new.

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