Leah Rosenberg
Mono/Chromatic
September 30 - December 16, 2016
Kenderdine Art Gallery
Curator, Leah Taylor
ForEveryday, A Colour, Rosenberg re-visited places from her childhood growing up in Saskatoon, reflecting on landmarks and changes of season. She also considered larger frameworks, such as the rapidly changing cityscape, and local Modernist painting histories. She has recorded her immediate surroundings by adding a new layer of coloured paint to the walls each day for thirty consecutive days, creating an immersive, temporal installation. The geometric forms that were created by masking off an area, expose a visual map alluding to a topographic geography of Saskatchewan.
Rosenberg has chronologically listed and named each colour in a key as a way to offer hints or subtext. From the cement colour of Lion’s Skatepark to the colour of Wild Blue Flax (at night), her colour selections highlight moments that might otherwise be overlooked in the everyday beyond the walls of the gallery.
Traces of her activity remain evident in the materiality of the paint’s thickness and coloured drips. The repetitive act of (re)painting the space each day also became performative. With a playful, yet orderly and regimented activity, the gallery-turned-studio became a kind of landscape painting or a calendar…a map for the city, about the city.
About the Artist
Color and process play a primary role in my practice. I select and layer colors informed by the external world of my day-to-day experience that then take shape through paintings, paint-based sculptures, site-specific installations, and performance. Gathering location-based palettes is the impetus for color-based installations. For example, Everyday A Color, a large-scale painting of the Outer Sunset –I sourced colors from blooming plants, sun-faded garage doors, the morning fog –to create an abstracted, yet representative portrait of the neighborhood. My process of accrual, of layering color and material, explores how our experiences and memories literally pile up.
