The GOODS from Kafka’s
Vancouver, BC | Join us on Thursday, June 14th from 8pm to 11pm for the opening of artist Kari Kristensen’s stunning new exhibit, Imagined Landscape.
Kari Kristensen’s work embraces disparate lines of Canadian and international art history, responding to both through new forms. Printmaking, in spite of sustained practice across geography and cultures, has a quiet platform in contemporary Western art. Kari recognizes the growing relevance of artisanal processes and methodical meticulousness in a modern context that both undervalues and yearns for them. She seeks to reimagine the Canadian Landscape tradition and its persistence in her and our consciousness, most notably in her current series Imagined Landscape.
Harnessing lino printing’s even ink application, combined with the choice of a clean monochrome aesthetic, Kari fully embraces the limitations of the medium itself, only to defy them. She draws focus to the print process and even the ink and paper, as their respective dark and light restrict her expression to line. Our view is always coloured by previous experiences and projections; by giving our eyes the bare minimum of information here, Kari invites the full measure of our preconceptions, memories, and nostalgic associations for the Canadian Landscape to play into what we see.
Whatever references each viewer brings to this work, from personally known environments to collectively dreamed ones, what Kari brings forward through colour and form charges us to look, while what she leaves out charges us to see.
Imagined Landscape Opening
Thursday, June 14, 2018 | 8 – 11pm