Sara Robichaud Makes No Apologies
Sara Robichaud, “Unapologetic – Romantic Notions of a Modern Woman,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72” x 72”
Vancouver Island painter Sara Robichaud has moved from the abstract to include recognizable domestic objects in her paintings, but not without a certain anxiety. She jokes that it feels like she’s cheating on abstraction as she discusses her fascination with antique lamps, dishes and other home furnishings. “I’m addicted to outlining, tracing their shadows, appreciating their formal beauty,” she says. In one painting, milky when wet, included in her solo show at Vancouver’s Gallery Jones until Nov. 18, a vintage hand-held blow dryer is nestled into a disembodied sink. In another, pressed and curled, the cord of a curling iron winds across the metal frame of an ironing board, an image so ethereal it almost evokes an icon. But just as the tenderness of a lover’s touch remains encoded in the body, the lessons of abstraction lurk in Robichaud’s paintings, prone to surface at unexpected moments.
Sara Robichaud, “pressed and curled,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 40” x 26”
Unapologetic: Romantic Notions of a Modern Woman, the painting from which her show draws its title, features an antique tea trolley that she and her young daughter use for parties. Much of the canvas is left raw. Into this void, Robichaud has introduced a pencil tracing of the trolley’s shadow. A pale expanse of monochromatic pink occupies the base and right side of the canvas. An undulating form atop the trolley could be an abstract element, but also evokes the pattern from an antique china bowl. A creeping pool of paint that traces the bowl’s shadow resembles sparkling pink lemonade. Robichaud describes a final element, a hard-edged fluorescent yellow triangle with no real-life referent, as a nod back to abstraction.
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Sara Robichaud, “Unapologetic – Romantic Notions of a Modern Woman,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72” x 72” (detail)
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Sara Robichaud traces the shadow of an upside-down tea trolley as she creates “Unapologetic – Romantic Notions of a Modern Woman.”
Viewers may not understand all that’s going on in the images without Robichaud's description – but the semi-recognizable forms are intriguing in their own right, offering a range of narrative possibilities. While they evoke the understated colour schemes of home decor, they are materially rich. Robichaud, who is also represented by the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, not only traces, but stains, layers, scrapes and lays down textured patches of gel, sometimes using lace as a stencil. Her strategies often involve binaries: not only the contrast between bare and painted canvas but also the play of negative and positive space and the juxtaposition of linear elements and voluptuous curves. She plays with the surfaces, making some flat masses of colour glossy, others matte. Her work, she says, inquires into “the atmospheric and lyrical qualities of the form and the hard physicality of their materiality.”
Robichaud became interested in objects after she finished her MFA at the University in Victoria in 2009 and bought a house in Nanaimo with her husband. With renovations underway, and her studio a place to store supplies and fixtures, she began to focus on those forms and hit on the idea of tracing objects and their shadows in her paintings. At the same time she was facing the typical tensions of working mothers, as she tried to balance career and domestic responsibilities. Her solution was to entwine both. She began painting directly onto the walls of her house, transforming it into what she calls “a walk-through painting.”
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A wall painting of a vintage blow dryer, “Handy Hannah,” by Sara Robichaud.
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Sara Robichaud, “milky when wet,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 30” x 24”
Last summer, she invited guests for informal tours, building on the performative aspects of her home as an evolving installation, a sort of domestic laboratory for visual research. “The fluctuating state of my home mirrors my working process,” Robichaud writes in her artist statement, “revealing the provisional steps I take when constructing a painting, and acts like a venue to stage ideas and enact potential outcomes.”
The dusty rose walls of her bedroom, for instance, become the substrate on which she paints the shadow of an antique lamp on the bedside table. The shadow is juxtaposed with the outline of panes of glass, as if the morning sun was shining onto the wall. A pattern that echoes the lamp’s glass light shade is added in heavy iridescent pearl gloss, hanging like the tail of a fancy window dressing. Above is a flat dark shape that resembles a breakfast tray. In the midst of the painting is the room’s actual light switch. Elements of this exploration – the lacy pattern and the dark shape – appear in the painting, Livre D’or Rose.
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A wall painting of “Livre D’or Rose” in progress in Sara Robichaud’s bedroom.
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Sara Robichaud, “Livre D’or Rose,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 30” x 24”
Situating an art practice in the domestic sphere is a fraught decision, even today. Women’s art – and themes of domesticity – were disparaged in misogynist ways throughout much of modernist history. Feminist interventions in the 1970s helped to legitimize women’s experiences as a topic for art, but biases continue. The current mood of self-revelation and inclusivity, helped along by social media campaigns, seems to be shifting the moment further. Robichaud, as the title of her show suggests, makes no apologies. Her work engages clichés of the feminine, yet also deconstructs them. The domestic sphere becomes a site of both spaciousness and tension, reflecting the passage of time, the changing and the unchanging.
Sara Robichaud, “Vanitas,” 2017
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 33.5” x 37” (detail)
Gallery Jones
1-258 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1A6
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