SHAWN EVANS

In 2016, Shawn Evans attended a summer residency at the Banff Centre. During this time he took many photographs, some became source imagery for his explorations there. One image of the mountains, sky and a non-descript rooftop in the foreground, had a particular resonance for him. Four years later, amid the first lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic, the image resurfaced in his studio. As the artist describes it, the lockdowns in Toronto were particularly severe. He recalls times when he, his wife and their two young sons could not even leave the house. In this atmosphere of anxiety and restriction, the landscape became theoretical, and in the studio, accessible through art history, particularly the group of seven.  These sources became intertwined in a time of immense change, when it was hard to tell what to trust, what sources were true or not, our external lives turned inward and our tether to the reality we once knew became transient and elusive.

In this context, Evans picked up this Banff photo and started to work with it again. He painted the same image repetitively. This process, like in a game of telephone, allowed the message to transform or transcend the literal depiction of reality in the photograph into a multifaceted arena of memory, illusion, alteration, and play. Under this pretense, it became easy to entwine a personal narrative with a historical one.

“Starting up a conversation with a bunch of dead painters didn’t seem that odd in a time when I couldn’t physically talk to anyone anyway. Their paintings were very much of their time, and I wanted to bring them forward into ours. I started to reference directly and pull parts of paintings I found a likeness to in my photograph. In a time when our reality was changing daily it wasn’t a huge leap to lose myself within theirs.”