NEWS RELEASE
ELORA CENTRE FOR THE ARTS
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Artist Sherry Czekus of Waterloo begins her paintings by becoming one of the crowd, as part of the everyday experience. On busy city sidewalks with her camera, she makes her source images of the urban crowd and its figurative gestures, intersections and spaces between its members.
Czekus investigates the rise of urban culture as a social phenomenon where people used to take to the sidewalks of the city, as a way to see and be seen, interacting and socializing publicly.
“The distraction of cell phones has changed our visual perception of the physical crowd experience” says Czekus. “It is this fleeting and fragmented sense of perception specific to our time and circumstance that poses problems in painting that I find worthy of investigation” she says.
In ‘Metropolitans’, Czekus considers the crowd as an entity that forms as a result of the structure of the urban environment. Abstracted segments of the figures and patterns on clothing dominate the shallow space in the paintings that attempt to illustrate the visual perception of the everyday experience of city life.
The paintings conceal the identities of the individual figures caught in the scene in an effort to expose the identity of the crowd at large. The language of painting takes up the problem of presenting the crowd in an atmosphere that has yet to be determined in art.
The work challenges us to reconsider our role and place within a crowd and question if we are a participant, an observer or not present at all.
About the artist:
Sherry Czekus is a Canadian painter based in Waterloo, who completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Studio Specialization from University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Education from Wilfrid Laurier University. She has exhibited her work in private and public art galleries in Canada and the United States.
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