July 1 – Aug. 14, 2010
Hamilton Artists Inc
The title of Teri Donovan’s exhibition, Half-life, generally refers to how long it takes for a substance to be reduced to half of its activity. Donovan uses this term as a metaphor for the long duration past influences have on any given subject. In her view, as the present becomes the past, it asserts an influence over the future via the mechanism of memory and projection.
Co-mingling wallpaper patterns and paint layers, Donovan sandwiches the past with the present to foreshadow a future embedded with bygone remnants. Old notions, styles, and behaviours, like old wallpaper, are replaced by the new, but are never really gone. In the guise of memory and desire they linger on in a spectral half-life projecting into the future where they emerge to be re-enacted, re-contextualized, and re-interpreted.
Donovan’s work addresses that tenacious desire for life that guarantees the past’s role in the present and the future, and simultaneously suggests how the present secures its own place as it moves towards its inevitable fate.
Teri Donovan is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. She graduated from York University and studied at the Ontario College of Art, the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and the University of Toronto. She is represented by The Red Head Gallery in Toronto, and her work was featured in Carte Blanche Vol.2: Painting 2008, a survey of contemporary painting in Canada.
Design by Juni Cuneyt Birol
