Altered Land by Judith Berry at gallery to Sept. 9
Altered Land is a collection of landscape paintings by Montreal artist, Judith Berry. The Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery is very pleased to be hosting an exhibition of paintings by Quebec artist Judith Berry this summer.
Hosting out-of-province artists and introducing their work to the community enriches and deepens the cultural resources of the province.
The opening will be on Thursday, July 27, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Everyone is welcome; attendance is free, and the artist will be in attendance.
Judith Berry’s paintings are bright, colourful, engaging, simultaneously playful and entirely mysterious. The lush green vegetation suggests landscape, yet the forms in the closely cropped compositions transition to suggest figures, faces, and hands, at times still life objects and other scenes of heightened drama.
Populated with vegetative forms, her figures are often set against a soft green sky or dry desert-like background, and while the forms that fill her canvases appear to be buildings, targets, ropes, sticks, and bubbles, they are ambiguous in reference and in scale.
A vegetal form might represent a tree, a plant, a gesture in paint, or a small part of someone’s face. For the artist, this preoccupation with shifting scale is parallel to the experience of life, in which our routines and surroundings may be relatively simple, but they cannot be disentangled from the larger picture of the climate crisis, inequality, and the chaos of contemporary life.
“Along with an inevitable blend of my daily perceptions and preoccupations, the works contain a contemplation of the larger period in which I paint. It is my hope that when looking at the
paintings, the viewer retains a sense of both scales, of our intimate lives against the macrocosm of our times,” said Judith Berry about the works in the exhibition.
Judith Berry – Biography
Judith Berry was born in London, Ontario and grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and spent one year in the Studio Program at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts.
She has had solo exhibitions across Canada in Montreal,
Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa. She has participated in several art fairs, including a solo exhibition in the UK, at the London Art Fair in 2020.
Judith has also shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Musée du Québec and the Canada Science and Technology Museum. She has received funding from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council.
Her work is in various collections including the Musee du Québec, the City of Ottawa, the City of Montreal, Global Affairs Canada, and the Art Bank of the Canada Council. She has served as a jury member for the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the City of Ottawa. She is represented by Galerie Art Mûr in Montreal.
Judith Berry lives and works in Montreal.
