1700 La Poste - Carol Wainio

CAROL WANIO

Réenchantement 

October 13, 2023 - January 21, 2024

As part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, the Montreal's gallery 1700 La Poste presents an exhibition dedicated to the Canadian artist Carol Wainio.

The exhibition Reenchantment highlights paintings and drawings primarily created in recent years. They explore the folktales and fables that populate our collective memory and testify to the persistence and resonance of stories through time. Linked to both grand and small narratives, they depict the threats facing future generations and evoke the hope for renewal.

For inspiration and for some of her works’ main themes, the artist used images from her own collection of old post cards many if which were based on fables. She reinterprets and reconstructs the images and the fables into her own artistic visual narrative. For instance, her painting The Fall (2015 / Acrylic on canvas) - see the photo just below this paragraph – is based on the fable from the oral French tradition Le Petit Poucet that was re-transcribed by Charles Perrault in 1697, see Wikipedia. Below the photo of her painting, there is the image of the postcard she used for that painting, at the bottom-middle of the photo.

The gallery's owner Ms. ISABELLE DE MEVIUS stated this in the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition:

 "The paintings of Carol Wainio, whose inspiration is nourished by the breath of centuries of art history, offers us a pictorial language of rare beauty and a style as original as it is inventive, which escapes the criteria of established recognitions. In the same painting, the artist introduces various elements in the form of collages of images of different styles. The effect of observing a painting within a painting then establishes a tension between the subjects. The motifs are treated like a puzzle of images which can be explained by a dialectic similar to that of a dream."

About the Artist

Carol Wainio was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1955 to Finnish immigrants and grew up in Waterloo, Ontario. Since 1980, she has lived and worked in Montréal, Ottawa, and other places. She developed an early interest in visual art through her father and pursued studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (1976) and the University of Toronto (1978–1979) before earning an MFA from Concordia University, Montréal, in 1985. There, she worked with Guido Molinari and undertook additional studies in the history of ideas, developing a painting practice that draws on interests in history, narrative, and broader visual culture—brought together in a discursive, visceral approach, where figures from past and present, high art and vernacular forms of expression, engage in shifting, layered grounds. Her work has been described as visually dense, conceptually full, and marked by a desire to use painting as a means to consider representation itself as well as real world issues.

Wainio’s work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario, and many other museums and public galleries across Canada. Her paintings are part of major Canadian museum collections as well as corporate and private collections. Wainio is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2014). She is currently represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, and Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary.

In the three photos below, Carol Wainio is presenting her paintings to journalists at a Press Conference on October 6, 2023, held at 1700 La Post gallery. 

1700 La Poste

1700 La Poste is an exhibition centre for contemporary art dedicated to supporting and disseminating the work of visual artists through the production of exhibitions, publications, documentary films and conferences.  It is located in a heritage building at 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West, Montreal. It was built in 1913 to house Postal Station F. A century later, it was entirely redesigned and restored to reflect the singular and audacious vision of its owner, Isabelle de Mévius, and Luc Laporte, one of Montreal’s most significant architects. For the past ten years, Isabelle de Mévius has contributed to the promotion of artists from here and elsewhere through her patronage and passion for the arts.

In a photo just below, Isabelle de Mévius is being interviewed by the journalist in front of Carol Wainio's painting.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos @ Nadia Slejskova

For this article's dedicated internet address, click on the title above the very first photo.

For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.

The admission to the exhibition if free of charge.