Winnie Truong
Paper Cuts
April 1st–April 23rd, 2016
Opening: Friday, April 1st 6–9pm
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping behind that pattern.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Paper Cuts is a new body of work by Winnie Truong that was created over the course of a two-month period of isolation at the Doris McCarthy Artist Residency at Fool’s Paradise. A studio and retreat for artists endowed by the late Canadian painter to the Ontario Heritage Trust. Truong collected and drew from her surroundings winter cottage and landscape, the rough-hewn silhouettes of branches, withered florae, and dry grass which she used as layered and dimensional elements that organically emerge from her deserted nude figures.
On this idyllic site, perched upon the Scarborough Bluffs, Truong explores ideas of loneliness, tranquillity, nature, domesticity, femininity, self-care, and self-indulgence while channelling the quiet rebellion of Doris’s life on the Bluffs. Doris McCarthy bought the property in 1939 and got it’s name from her mother who called it “Fool’s Paradise”. The provenance of the site and spirit of independence is embodied by Wimmin-creatures Truong creates from line work and cut paper. Truong’ subjects are all at once fragile, robust, and blasé as they pose suspended in their environments of carefully placed stems and tendrils; Wimmin-creatures with overgrowths and imperfections that mingle and merge into the body’s flesh and folds, who not only thrive in isolation, but birth their own environments.
The artist wishes to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
