REFLECTION OF A WINDOW
Ella Gonzales
22 January 2022 –26 March 2022
Window Gallery, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, ON
“I'm interested in how paintings can hold and carry multiple meanings; paintings that can create a volume that is not inhabited, but one that is imagined and exists on the surface.” — Ella Gonzales
Reflection of a Window can be understood as a site of many dwellings. Ella Gonzales’ practice involves a layered and complicated narrative of migration. Her paintings are deeply rooted in familial memory and lived experience, yet waver between abstract and representational in their composition. Gonzales’ ongoing process involves imagining combinations and altered architectural features of houses and spaces that she and her family have lived in since migrating from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Canada.
While referencing family photos and home videos, her paintings resemble the tricky nature of memory: where the spaces that feel so familiar can suddenly fall out of focus, or gradually bleed into one another, over time. Painting on thin and semi-transparent jusi and piña silks, the light travels through the artist’s thin layers of paint, diluted and soaked into the surface and creating a mirror image on their reverse. Scenes of “home” become abstracted into empty rooms that no longer resemble their referential counterparts.
The materiality of Gonzales’ paintings is also wrapped in memory. The deep crease in her suspended painting Light gather (2022) acts as a reminder of the fabric being folded, packed and shipped from the Philippines by the artist’s aunts. Gonzales continues this process of folding, creasing, draping and stretching the fabric in order to create an adaptable surface for her paintings that can be packed and presented in multiple ways—folded, restretched, visible from both sides or held by different support structures.
The surfaces of Gonzales’ paintings do not exist in a permanent state. Instead, they offer the potential to change and compose altered images over time. Positioned here, in a windowed gallery, they linger in a space caught between coming and going; resting and pausing. Through her (dis)assembly of memories and disruption of permanence, Gonzales considers how the spaces in between can act as a dwelling place for memory to exist and resist forgetting.
~~~
Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist working between painting and ComputerAided Design programs, as led by her interest in space making. Her paintings and installations are inspired by narratives of migration that inform the Filipino Diaspora. She has shown work with Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto), the plumb (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Pumice Raft (Toronto), Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre (Kingston), and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto). Gonzales holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and was the recent recipient of the 2021 Nancy Petry Award in painting.
Photo credit: Ella Gonzales
Installation team: Ella Gonzales and Carina Magazzeni
Exhibition Coordinators: Anne-Sophie Grenier
Essay by GHY Cheung
Ella Gonzales
22 January 2022 –26 March 2022
Window Gallery, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, ON
“I'm interested in how paintings can hold and carry multiple meanings; paintings that can create a volume that is not inhabited, but one that is imagined and exists on the surface.” — Ella Gonzales
Reflection of a Window can be understood as a site of many dwellings. Ella Gonzales’ practice involves a layered and complicated narrative of migration. Her paintings are deeply rooted in familial memory and lived experience, yet waver between abstract and representational in their composition. Gonzales’ ongoing process involves imagining combinations and altered architectural features of houses and spaces that she and her family have lived in since migrating from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Canada.
While referencing family photos and home videos, her paintings resemble the tricky nature of memory: where the spaces that feel so familiar can suddenly fall out of focus, or gradually bleed into one another, over time. Painting on thin and semi-transparent jusi and piña silks, the light travels through the artist’s thin layers of paint, diluted and soaked into the surface and creating a mirror image on their reverse. Scenes of “home” become abstracted into empty rooms that no longer resemble their referential counterparts.
The materiality of Gonzales’ paintings is also wrapped in memory. The deep crease in her suspended painting Light gather (2022) acts as a reminder of the fabric being folded, packed and shipped from the Philippines by the artist’s aunts. Gonzales continues this process of folding, creasing, draping and stretching the fabric in order to create an adaptable surface for her paintings that can be packed and presented in multiple ways—folded, restretched, visible from both sides or held by different support structures.
The surfaces of Gonzales’ paintings do not exist in a permanent state. Instead, they offer the potential to change and compose altered images over time. Positioned here, in a windowed gallery, they linger in a space caught between coming and going; resting and pausing. Through her (dis)assembly of memories and disruption of permanence, Gonzales considers how the spaces in between can act as a dwelling place for memory to exist and resist forgetting.
~~~
Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist working between painting and ComputerAided Design programs, as led by her interest in space making. Her paintings and installations are inspired by narratives of migration that inform the Filipino Diaspora. She has shown work with Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto), the plumb (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Pumice Raft (Toronto), Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre (Kingston), and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto). Gonzales holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and was the recent recipient of the 2021 Nancy Petry Award in painting.
Photo credit: Ella Gonzales
Installation team: Ella Gonzales and Carina Magazzeni
Exhibition Coordinators: Anne-Sophie Grenier
Essay by GHY Cheung