About the work

Memories have always been a predominant theme in my work. I practice art with the belief that one of our most important roles as an artist is to use our work to ask questions about the world around us and then try to answer them. The questions I have been asking in my work for the past five years pertain mostly to the world in which my children participate along with reminiscences growing up in Canada in a much simpler time. One subject I’ve explored in my work examines my family and our friends cavorting on California beaches. Brief, rare idyllic freedoms that is far too few for today’s youth growing up in our overprotective world. Watching local surfers hang out in Malibu and Ventura are also typical inspirations. More recently I began exploring imagery of the Toronto lakeshore of my childhood. Despite the familiarity and comfort of these themes, I am always left with a deep dissatisfaction that my questions are perhaps too personal and not very provocative or “avant-garde” enough and that my work reads as naive. In the back of mind the parallels I am asking are if my children will reflect on their childhood as free and as happy as mine was growing up in Toronto, Canada or will they know they grew up in a less innocent world? Expanding upon this I delved into images of Toronto as a new and very personal examination in my artwork in the spring of 2008. I travelled there for a quick visit and was waiting to meet my family. I was overwhelmed emotionally as I saw my hometown through new eyes. I was flooded with memories and struck by an overpowering need to immediately begin examining Toronto with my camera but I was really capturing my youthful life story. I began this new series entitled “Going Home” back in my Santa Monica studio that summer and fall using iconic imagery and landmarks such as Canadian geese taking flight over Lake Ontario, Island ferries and street cars—all symbols rich in meaning to me. The work combines partial photographic sections combined with brushy washes of acrylic inks. A process that lends itself to this feeling of memory by allowing only an incomplete representation through the use of some photography and then filling in my own blanks with paint. Since then I have returned a total of four more times in the last year and a half. I want people who see my work to come into contact with Toronto, (or LA for that matter) through my rose tinted glasses. This is how I want my work to be experienced, not through its government strikes or dirty slushy winters but as a thriving Chinatown where I had bowls of consommé on rainy days as a little girl, of the corner variety store where my father grew up and of endless deep Canadian blue skies and as a city that has, for me, never lost its innocence.