Tia Halliday

Gestures of care expressed with vigorous physicality.

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A human being is a force that moves through time and space. This seemingly simple concept is explored in a series of vigorous figurative paintings by Tia Halliday in Gestures of Care – The Weight of the World. 

On view at the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary until Oct. 7, Halliday’s works use line to map physical actions and interactions across abstract colour fields, revealing complex dynamics like care and resiliency and giving agency to female bodies. 

These works are not traditional figure studies. Rather, they are choreographed interactions that ask us to contemplate how the body expresses states of being, whether exhaustion, vulnerability or exuberance. It’s the body’s physicality and its movement that capture Halliday’s attention.

In Lifeline, two female figures stand together in an intimate and loving embrace. They are painted over other bodies that suggest a past moment in which one carried the other, revealing how intimate relationships, whether with a sister, a mother or a friend, can offer comfort and propel us forward. 

Halliday roots her practice in the formal traditions of abstract painting, while using her background in dance to work across multiple disciplines, including photography, performance, textiles and sculpture. A tenure-track professor at the University of Calgary, she has taught painting and drawing for over a decade, highlighting the physical language that emerged from modernist abstraction, which emphasized rhythm and movement and used terms like “push” and “pull,” as well as concepts like lightness and density. She views this language as choreographic, explaining: “These are cues for movement – physical movement, not just pictorial, visual movement.” 

Such cues abound in Halliday’s latest work. For instance, the figures in Reciprocation are frenzied and acrobatic. Rendered in vivid reds and warm pinks, these tumbling bodies are rife with tension as they repetitively bend and roll. Their complex dance is both riveting and exhausting. Viewers must move their eyes rapidly to capture the rhythmic patterns and interactions.

All painters can be viewed as choreographers who direct bodies and other imagery onto their canvas or tango with formal elements like colour, form and line. But the physicality Halliday constructs through lyrical gestures is impressive. To transmit the weight of a body rendered only in line requires skill and careful observation. 

Her forms also define how we view and negotiate space. This is particularly evident in Bearing the Weight, where bodies rendered in dark blue lines compress into a tangled blue mass on the painting’s right edge. This visual weight contrasts with the airiness of the left side, boosting the work’s tension. You can almost feel the canvas tipping to the right. 

In Up-Lifting, intertwining female bodies lift each other up. The painting, somehow reminiscent of Picasso’s famous antiwar mural, Guernica, is composed with lyrical flowing lines that shift seamlessly between abstraction and figuration. These women resist objectification of their suffering. Instead, the tight-knit group collectively raises itself from despair. The women’s bare breasts, either abstracted or softly rendered, transform any sexual impulse into a nurturing gaze. Neither posed nor reposed, they are engaged citizens. In this way, Halliday resists the male gaze, giving her subjects agency through actions that speak thematically to community, responsibility and radical care. ■

Tia Halliday, Gestures of Care – The Weight of the World, at the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary from Sept. 8 to Oct. 7, 2023.

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