Visual Arts

Paintings

Trevor Brett

I make art to share with others my perceptions of thought and experience. I believe time spent creating and engaging with art is time spent on both a personal and a larger cultural development. My work participates in the conversation of art, in particular painting, by exploring the qualities abstraction has for expressing an experience of a seemingly ambiguous world that is essentially in constant flux. My work investigates this world with its layers of information that aren’t necessarily physically visible, yet can be explored through art.

These paintings are from an ongoing series that explores the forms and motifs that have become architectural tropes in their repeated use in certain buildings as monuments. The “Legislature” series uses an analysis and abstraction of provincial legislature buildings in Canada by abstracting this use of architectural tropes through a process of geometric simplification and repetition and with the use of an abstracted colour vocabulary. The “Cathedral” series employs a similar approach but with the addition of a window-like framing device that further points to a critical reading of these buildings’ cultural meanings. These paintings use a critical and playful irony in the otherwise seriousness of these types of buildings’ symbolism, thus drawing critical attention to their functions in a contemporary context where monuments are increasingly being questioned. Furthermore, conceptually, the paint of the painted image itself exists as a facade – as skin sitting over a monochromatic underpainting – expressing that these institutional buildings’ symbolic meanings themselves are, and should be, open to criticism and reimagining.