Visiting Artist: Shawn Serfas
Visiting Artist
Shawn Serfas: Inland
Join us this Friday, November 20th at 1:00 pm in ATAC 1007 with visiting artist Shawn Serfas for a special lecture on his latest series: Inland.
Shawn is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University. Although initially drawn to an academic career in the environmental sciences, he pursued Fine Arts and Art History degrees in Saskatchewan as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree in Alberta. He has taught for the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia. His research interests include contemporary painting, drawing and printmaking practices concerning relational abstraction, environmental aesthetics, religion, the landscape as well as issues bordering abstraction and representation.
Swirling, thrusting marks traverse complex surfaces in this new body of large-scale abstract paintings called the Inland Series by Shawn Serfas. The artist explores the toxic potential of oily black as it infuses the ground, almost extinguishing the incendiary bars of hot red and yellow that burn like a furnace in the bottom quadrant of several of the paintings. Manipulating the liquidity of paint, the artist creates wet layers and crackling surfaces that illustrate the alchemic properties of the material. Serfas addresses environmental issues in these works, the uneasy pollution of materials seeping into the unspoiled cells of pure colour. This world is in dramatic flux, churning and changing; each painting evidence of an arrested state of human-made unbalance.