Rhoda Rosenfeld

Rhoda Rosenfeld is a Vancouver-based visual artist and poet. As a visual artist she has worked with photography and painting, at times combining the two. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery features a series of paintings Rosenfeld has been producing since 1988.

The Dark Works, to be exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery from October 31, were derived from a set of photographs taken by Rosenfeld in 1970. Before the film was developed, it was damaged by moisture and, as a result, the intended landscape images were obscured by ghostly biomorphic shapes. The landscapes in the paintings are also obscured, this time by a turbulent layer of brush marks that force a slow visual assimilation of the image. This veiling of the image is metaphoric of Rosenfeld's feeling about our relationship with a landscape that is increasingly mediated by technology through ecological erosion and the mass media. Rhoda Rosenfeld works slowly, producing an average of two paintings a year. The paintings are large, 5 feet by 8 feet, and are installed unstretched. The materials she employs include clay, oil paint, oil stick and colour pencil.