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Week of 22 March 2002 · Vol. V, No. 27
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Past and present merge on canvases by award-winning CFA alum

By Hope Green

Caren Canier fell in love with Italy at age 23, when she won a painting fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. She recalls her first tour of the ruins at Pompeii.

 
  Caren Canier (CFA'76) stands near her Muybridge-inspired collage painting Coming and Going at a March 15 opening reception for her show at the GSU. Photo by Albert l'Étoile
 

"A resident classicist at the academy that year took us into a Pompeiian villa and described what people's lives were like in ancient Rome," she says. "That stuck with me -- the idea that life 2,000 years ago was so closely connected to our own. I was overwhelmed by what I saw and the way in which, in Europe in general but in Italy in particular, you are constantly aware of the past."

Ties between the ancient and the modern are strongly in evidence in the mind-bending collage landscapes of Coming and Going: Time and Motion in the Paintings of Caren Canier, an exhibition on view through April 22 at the George Sherman Union Gallery.

In one of the works, a woman goes about her domestic chores in a red house with missing walls, its foundation perched on an antique sculpted head lying on its side. The planet Saturn fills the sky over a castle, and an image of two horsemen -- borrowed from a relief carving at the Parthenon in Greece -- appears to come to life on the castle grounds. Sometimes it's hard to tell human from statue as classical figures float high above a town or are seen chatting together in the middle of a country road.

Since her Rome fellowship, Canier has summered in the Italian countryside. Not surprisingly, references to the art and landscapes of Italy are abundant in her work.

"I usually start off by looking for sources that are somehow engaging, mysterious, or resonant for me," she says. "Then I work in a very intuitive way, cutting and pasting and making up stories about these people in relation to each other and the landscape. I'm interested in the ways people live and the kinds of spaces they inhabit."

 

Piazza, 18" x 24", tempura with mixed media on paper, 2000.

 
 

Canier (CFA'76), recipient of the 2002 School of Visual Arts Distinguished Alumni Award, is a professor of visual design and painting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Her work is in many private and public collections, and she has received numerous awards, including grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation.

The summer after her junior year at Cornell, Canier attended the BU Tanglewood program in visual arts. As a graduate student at CFA, she studied with figurative representational painter James Weeks and with Philip Guston, who is widely recognized for his figurative work as well as for his abstract expressionist paintings.

Like many art students, Canier developed her own style after years of experimentation -- and some frustration. To relax, she would take a break and compose small collages out of postage stamps with portraits on them, but gradually this type of work took on more significance. Guston encouraged her to keep at it.

"He was interested in the collages because they were quirky and peculiar and very much my own, perhaps in a way that my paintings were not," Canier says. "In my paintings, I was trying to emulate famous artists."

Collage became her preferred medium, and Canier began to create works in mixed media that incorporate photocopied images with paint on canvas.

While at CFA, she discovered the work of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose motion-sequence shots of humans and animals inspired the advent of motion pictures. These figures have appeared in her collages for the past 25 years, and the exhibition contains many examples, such as identical nudes climbing staircases, a column of men in top hats, and sequenced images of a woman in a field putting on a shawl -- bringing to mind an old-fashioned flip book with its pages torn out and laid side by side.

 
  Santina Goes to Washington, 18" x 24", tempura with mixed media on paper, 2001.
 

A few of the works on view have as their focal point pictures of clockfaces that Canier clipped from an antiques catalogue, and in one of these, a clock hovers in the sky like a celestial body. "I think of these collage paintings as being about the way we experience the passing of time," she explains, "but also about timelessness, and the many ways time collapses in our lives through memories, recollections, and intuitions. My interest in history and the ancient world has a lot to do with that."

Coming and Going: Time and Motion in the Paintings of Caren Canier, is at the Sherman Gallery, George Sherman Union, second floor, 775 Commonwealth Ave., through April 21. Canier will give a gallery talk on Saturday, April 20, at 3:30 p.m. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 358-0295.

       

22 March 2002
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