introducing Erica Beyea & Sherry Czekus
Emerging artists new to our gallery
Erica Beyea
Erica Beyea grew up in Riverview, NB. She moved to Toronto in 2001 to study at OCAD and completed her BFA at NSCAD in 2006. After graduation she returned to Toronto where she lived until 2017, when she moved to Granada, Spain.
In 2014, she founded Girls’ Art League, a non-profit organization dedicated to the empowerment of women, girls and non-binary folk through visual arts. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, and has shown her work across Canada and southern Spain.
Enamoured with the qualities of oil paint, her work celebrates the medium; its pigment, light, tacticity and the limitless possibilities it holds.
“My work is largely concerned with place, memory and light. The subject matter varies from landscape, cityscapes, portraiture and still life - all incorporating a quiet sense of narrative. Using personal photographs as a jumping off point, each painting goes its own way from there. Oscillating between representation and abstraction, I try to saturate each painting with the emotion and internal experience of the moment the photo was taken.
Having lived away from where I grew up most of my life, I’ve always held a split sense of what ‘home’ is. Comparing and contrasting reality from experience, one place from another, and what I am carrying inside from what I am experiencing outside.
More recently, my work is divided into two threads - paintings from old photographs of exploring the outdoors in Canada; from the Niagara Escarpment to Fundy National Park - and paintings of my daily life here in Spain. As I plan my relocation back to Canada in Spring 2022, the first thread is connected to a sense of nostalgia, longing and excitement for my upcoming return, and the latter is looking to document; to remember the small moments I experience each day here in Spain. I’m keenly interested in what stays with you when you move from place to place, the way a place can change you and how your internal world completely affects your external perception of it.”
Sherry Czekus
Sherry Czekus is a Canadian painter based in Waterloo, ON, who completed her MFA at University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Studio Specialization from University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Education from Wilfrid Laurier University. The public domain, specifically the city, is a site of observation of urban crowd culture and its participants that Czekus explores through painting.
Making my paintings begins with becoming one of the crowd as part of the everyday experience. On busy city sidewalks with my camera, I make my source images of the urban crowd and its figurative gestures, intersections and spaces between its members. Since the emergence of flaneurism and urban culture in 19th century Europe, the online social frontier has recently developed and has changed our visual perception of the physical crowd experience. Painting, as a conceptual medium, simultaneously expands and collapses these moments I capture as an enriched site of knowledge about us as a collective. Straddling the boundaries of representation and abstraction, I allow the photographic language give way to the language of painting.
The physical crowd experience is continuously interrupted by the attraction of the social online community that can be accessed at all times through our handheld devices. It is this fleeting and fragmented sense of perception specific to our time and circumstance that poses problems in painting that I find worthy of investigation. The language of painting takes up the problem of presenting the crowd in an atmosphere that has yet to be determined in art.