Pat Stanley: FAULT LINES

The “Fault Lines” exhibition in the Paul Kane Gallery of the Art Gallery of Northumberland includes pieces from two series that I am currently developing. The “Fault Lines” series, paintings of Northumberland County in Ontario and Pontiac County in Quebec, explores an idyllic rural world where buildings from our agricultural past reveal unsettling elements of distortion and deconstruction. The “Urban Archaeology” series, paintings of downtown Toronto and the Gardiner Expressway, focus on city buildings and expressways. In some pieces, glass facades act as reflections of an altered version of reality or as a filter of a past or future landscape. In others, the Expressway disintegrates under an environmental onslaught. These evolving urban barriers limit our perception of the natural.

I explore the aesthetics of environmental interference and disintegration.