Bev Pike: Grottesque

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Bev Pike, "Buried Dancing Pavilion," 2015

gouache on paper, Photo: Robert Barrow, courtesy of the artist.

Central Gallery Bev Pike: Grottesque 

Curated by Blair Fornwald, Assistant Curator

January 19 to March 25, 2018Artist Talk (ASL Interpreted) and Reception: Friday, January 19, 7:00 pm

Winnipeg artist Bev Pike is known for her monumentally-scaled, performative landform paintings. Painted with gouache on paper, Pike’s works stretch from floor to ceiling and are no less than eighteen feet in length, enveloping the viewer. Pike’s most recent series, Underground Living, depicts underground grottos and caves, lush with baroque detailing. Giving her paintings evocative titles like Cavernous Sun Parlour, Buried Dancing Pavilion, and Subterranean Day Spa, Pike suggests that these are the leisure sites of a new underground civilization. Pike’s spaces reference the English landscape garden grottos and follies popular from the 16^th to the 18^th century, while evoking the cave dwellings of humanity’s most distant past and the interiority of the body. Strangely science fictional, these vast and empty interiors invite the viewer to psychically inhabit them, imagining a host of apocalyptic scenarios that could necessitate moving underground.