DYAN MARIE

Dyan Marie's recent photographically based and digitally created images involve close readings of local environments to create forms that establish a re-examined sense of the day to day.

An exhibiting artist since 1981, Marie also has a history of work in sculpture, public art and arts organizations. Dyan Marie's was co-founder of C Magazine, a Canadian art magazine focused on contemporary art and the founding member of Cold City Gallery, a contemporary art gallery that exhibited many of Canada's leading artists. In January 2000, Marie started ARTATWORK, ARTATWORK is a multi-disciplinary organization specializing in the support and development of the cultural environment.

Recent Exhibitions:

"Subjected to Change: Armatures for Standing Up"

Teenage hockey players, established businesswomen, and retired construction workers - Dyan Marie’s digital/photobased works on canvas build homes for them from the materials they touch.

This body of work proposes a series of houses, intended as monuments referencing everyday activities. These activities and related behaviors are framed by dramatically shifting expectations of what is appropriate. The homes are reflective places, places to see into and out from. They are sympathetic sites for constructing refreshed perspectives, armatures for standing up. Each building is assembled from images of objects touched by the intended owner of the house. In Retired Construction Worker House, the images come from the garden where he spends his retirement growing flowers and vegetables. Teenage Hockey Player House is built from photographs of standard protective equipment found in a hockey bag. House for Businesswoman shows the contents collected in a purse and articles of office clothing.

"Murmurs and Messages"

Photo based, digitally developed images of flowers, vines and plants seeded with a collection of single word poems.

This group of close-up flower images were primarily photographed from the modest local gardens in the Lansdown/Dupont neighborhood in Toronto. The photographs were scanned into a computer and digitally close-cropped to force an intense presentation of colour and view. The works were further pressed in and stretched open to create a confused space intended to read both as too small and too large simultaneously. Scattered over the surface of the flower images are tiny, coloured, single words which attempt to locate a reflective state that is a middle ground. The words offer up a frame of mind, history or time that is not involved with energy, ambition, action or will, but rests somewhere between positions of young and old, high and low, passion and passivity.

The images and text work together by balancing their straight-forward face value while also embodying their opposition: the skewering of the beauty of the flower images and the restlessness of the exploration for states of calm in the text.”

"Learning to Count"

A counting system repeated as individuals, as sequential generations and as endless history.

Learning to Count is a series of works that presents ten phases and ideas that are intended to represent the way issues surface in the mind. The work constructs a framework to situate continuous shifting concerns in a context of considering new ideas and reremembering past concerns. Concerns and ideas that may be explored and repeated as individuals, as sequential generations and as endless history.

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