the pace of days

MacDonald Stewart Art Centre,

Guelph, Ontario

January 23- April 6, 2014

In The Pace of Days, Monica Tap reimagines the tradition of landscape painting through her travels across Canada and Spain, including a 36-day walk along the Camino de Santiago in 2012-2013. The resulting works open a dialogue between landscape and abstraction, the expansion and compression of time, while bridging the disciplines of painting, photography, and video.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Christina Ritchie and Barry Schwabsky, who offer thoughtful insights into Tap’s work.

Artist statement:

the pace of days, 2013

36 folios

Acrylic on Fabriano paper

In the fall of 2012, I walked the length of the Camino Francés, traveling the eight hundred kilometers from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Every hour, on the hour, I paused to photograph the road ahead and the road behind. Over thirty-two days, I collected more than two hundred pairs of images. Back in my studio, I selected one pair from each day and translated them into the drawings you see here.

In the spring of 2013, I returned to Santiago de Compostela to walk the remaining 100 kilometers to Cape Finisterre. This rocky peninsula on Spain’s far west coast was once believed to be the end of the earth, and it offered a natural conclusion to this suite of drawings.