The gallery is pleased to present Community Gardens, an exhibition by Monica Tap presented in collaboration with MKG127 of Toronto.
Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology and memory. These 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.
Monica Tap is a Toronto-based artist and educator whose work takes a conceptual and systematic approach to unpacking codes of pictorial illusionism and perception. Her work has been featured in numerous art publications and presented in exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, including MKG127 (Toronto, ON), Peter Robertson Gallery (Edmonton, AB), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, SK), Wells College (Aurora, New York), Gallery Roy (Zülpich, Germany) and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. Tap has received many grants and awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant for her project, "Translation as a Strategy of Renewal in Painting". Tap holds an MFA from NSCAD University and is a professor in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph.
The gallery thanks Michael Klein, founder and director of MKG127.