5 November to 28 november, 2010
Show & Tell Gallery
Excerpted from gallery website:
In her new series The Harmless Anomalies Winnie continues to delve into ideas of beauty, normality, discomfort and the grotesque, through a family of portraits.
Using pencil crayon and chalk pastel on paper, Winnie focuses on her delicate line work to convey the whiskery, wispy, curly, bristly, intricacies of hair as it deviates from its expected behavior and towards something of science fiction.
The show titled The Harmless Anomalies describes the misbehaviors of hair and facial accoutrement as a trivial and inconsequential defect, while also referring to the band of characters within the portraits that exist as something both human and tangibly alien. Suspended within a void, Winnie’s portraits lack body and background to explore not only the core notions of beauty but also those experiences of isolation, anxiety, ambivalence, and discomfort within when beauty deviates from social and biological norm.
Born in 1988, Winnie Truong lives and works in Toronto and is a recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design’s drawing and painting program. Producing large-scale labour intensive drawings and using only pencil crayon and chalk pastel on paper, her monumental portraits exploit the drawn line to manipulate hair, flesh and blemish and continue to explore notions of beauty and discomfort. Winnie is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2010 W.O. Forsythe award, the 401 Richmond Career Launcher prize and the BMO 1st! Art Award for Ontario.
