Heather Carey, 2016.
Heather E Carey is a painter who is primarily interested in painting’s ability to explore positions of hybridity or duality. Painting can act as an object, an idea, a representation, and the result of a process. Carey explores spatial relationships, between imagined or conceptual space, physical space, and pictorial space. She paints spaces which are understandable, yet not necessarily possible. She is also interested in the idea of painting as installation, providing a more direct link to architecture and landscape. Our conception of space is often formed by contradictions of experience, memory, and imagination. (Bachelard called this phenomenon ‘syncretism’.) Painting has the ability to explore this ‘syncretic’ position.
This work, inspired by London, ON, grew from the simple idea of presenting a painting within a painting or a sign within a sign, playing with two separate spaces integrated into one piece. Carey has been exploring ideas of utopias/heterotopias, while referencing the local culture of consumerism, and working with the theme of desire through landscape painting and advertising. ‘Heterotopias’ are described by Foucault as being real, existing utopias which change in time and space, unique positions in the world which also attempt to represent the world in its entirety. These heterotopias can be identified in certain sites in all cities: gardens, billboards and monuments.
Semi-private Portholes features several diptychs and triptychs of indoor/outdoor spaces separated by windows. They are institutional spaces which are public in theory but exclusive in function. These panels reference the traditional function of paintings as windows to the world, but the space is cut up through the use of different panels. Advertising plays a role in both activating and creating barriers in these types of spaces as well.
Heather E Carey received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Guelph in 2009, before moving on to the University of Victoria where she finished her MFA in 2012 with a focus on painting. She has participated in group shows in Ontario and BC, as well as having solo exhibitions at Loop in Toronto, and DNA Artspace in London, Ontario. She has taught painting at Uvic and Glenhyrst Gallery in Brantford. She currently lives and works in London.
