June 2015
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
ALEKS BARTOSIK / Alien Sightings
June 5 – 28, 2015 / Vernissage Friday June 5 / 7 – 10pm.
Paintings and Other Things
Alien Sightings is an exhibition made up of small paintings and other surfaces that celebrate and embrace a new medium for the artist: the iridescent colours.
Inspired by my recent visit to Dawson City, my encounter with the northern lights had shifted my ideas towards exploring light and it’s effects on these iridescent color surfaces. Much like Monet sat and painted the haystacks during different times of the 24-hour day span to create his Impressionistic series of paintings, I too observe my subject matter covered in these iridescent colours and loosely mimic the artistic practise as portrayed by Monet.
In keeping with my continued fascination with imagined worlds and figuration, I take the ideas further and look at the combination of surrealist and futuristic thought, creating alternate realities and other worldly space through these dream-rich colours that shimmer throughout my paintings.
I would like to invite the viewer to think about alternative knowledge, about emotions, and interaction with others – I want to encourage the viewer to see and to experience a narrative that takes one to wander into a world of beautiful uncertainty, transition, and transformation. I have created a series of portraits (and their habitats) that aim to captivate the on-looker with their alienesque beauty in a colour-utopia.
I am a visual artist working figuratively and most often large-scale, where I combine drawing elements with painting, performance, installation, sculpture, and film/video. I explore the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and investigate one’s ability and willingness to imagine, pretend, dream and suspend disbelief. I am interested in our repressed fears and the sense of wonder engendered through curiosity and dream. Experimentation with different disciplines, surfaces, and spaces, enables me to invite the viewer to wander the realms and playgrounds I create as my drawings transform (drawing performances).
If you are not afraid of the dark, I would like to take you by the hand and lead you into my maze of pictorial creations that will take you to places you never been and show you things you never seen.
Aleks Bartosik presently works from her studio in Toronto. She obtained her MFA degree from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec in 2005. Bartosik is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2004 and 2007) for her figurative painting and drawing, and is generously supported for her work by the Ontario Arts Council. As part of Bartosik’s research and artistic development, she is an active participant in artist residencies and project collaborations all over the world. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in Canada (British Columbia, Québec, Ontario, and Alberta), USA, Germany, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Bartosik’s work is represented by La Petite Mort Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario) and is collected by Headbones Gallery (Vernon, British Columbia). Recently a catalogue of her work has been published and featured at Toronto Women’s Bookstore. Presently, Bartosik is employed at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Living Arts Centre (Mississauga) as a painting and drawing instructor.