INCOGNITO | LYN CARTER
26.11.2005 | 15.01.2006

A visual artist with a strong textile background, Lyn Carter employs pattern as symbol and disguise, surface and structure. In her series Cheat (2003), the artist draws from everyday culture and produces forms reminiscent of chess pieces, bottle stoppers, shovels, and faucets. These vaguely familiar forms are masked behind a veil of printed fabric and seem to slip back and forth between the real and the imaginary. The patterned areas expand and contract to generate the illusion of volume while the peripheral images are reduced to silhouettes.

Carter’s current work consists of wall-mounted sculptures made from a variety of patterned cloths. Deceptively, the works appear solid, while in truth they are hollow.

These abstract forms appear to be shaped by the action of gravity on a stretch material, but this sensation is carefully constructed so the effects are mimicked rather than real. The fabric skins are held taut between two points and act as both surface and structure. While some of the forms suggest identifiable objects, including organic bodily shapes, the dizzying patterns and dominant colours deny any predictable associations. Carter attempts to engage the boundary between sculpture and painting by applying some of painting’s illusionary tactics and approaches. Her intent is to compare illusionary space with the real spatial elements created by the sculptural elements.

Carolyn Bell Farrell, Senior Curator of the Koffler Gallery, comments:

Lyn Carter’s practice culls from the commonplace and the mass-produced, imparting uniqueness and specificity to objects that are plentiful yet, for the most part, invisible within daily life. Trolling the habitual roosts of perception, she injects the prosaic with pattern, colour and shifts in orientation to stretch the brevity of attention we normally grant them. Camouflaged as pedestrian forms, her amusing sculptures recapture our imagination, while inviting a consequent reconfiguration of the gaze.

Lyn Carter studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design and obtained her MFA from York University in 1994. Her solo exhibitions include Body Troubles at Hamilton Artists Inc., Hamilton, 1992; Double at Optica, Montréal, 1999; exhale at Red Head Gallery, Toronto, 2001; Cheat at Peak Gallery, Toronto, 2003; and most recently Preserve at White Water Gallery, Northbay, Ontario, 2004. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, notably Wearable Works at the Edmonton Art Gallery, 1987; Heavy Metal at The Power Plant, Toronto, 1995-96; Surface Tension, Art in General Gallery, New York, 1999; Red at the Museum for Textiles, Toronto, 2001; Semble at Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, 2002; Decoy at Open Studio, Toronto, 2004; and Skin Deep which was shown both at Stratford Gallery, Ontario in 2003, and the Art Gallery of Sudbury, Ontario in 2004. The artist is represented by Peak Gallery in Toronto.