If Kristy Gordon is anything, it’s bubbly.
Stepping into Cube Gallery before the vernissage of her new oil painting exhibition Beautiful & Dangerous, the 33-year-old B.C.-born artist was all smiles.
Walking through the gallery, Gordon’s character and presence start to make themselves known right away. Unsurprisingly, the same vivacity and liveliness that she shows in person have been transferred to her canvases.
“[Gordon] is such a genuine sort of loving human being,” Don Monet, owner of Cube Gallery, said. “You can see that coming through with all of her work, so in a sense the feeling in the gallery is of warmth and loving the subject matter that she’s painting.”
“It’s the feeling that you get from Kristy’s work, which is that you’re in the presence of somebody who’s got the skills of an old master, but she’s a young Canadian artist. There’s a feeling of being in the presence of a certain amount of greatness, I think.”
But Monet said Gordon’s talent goes beyond the technical.
“She has a talent for concept and subject matters that’s really on the cutting edge of what’s being spoken and worked through in the Canadian art world right now,” he said.
Anchoring the exhibition is what Monet described as a “blockbuster painting,” the six-by-six “Explosion,” which Gordon herself called “striking.”
“Explosion” captures a mushroom cloud split seconds into what Cube Gallery’s website calls “a burst of potential energy.” In an instant, chaos and violence are created where there was nothing moments before.
Juxtaposing seemingly opposite elements is a running theme in Beautiful & Dangerous.
Other paintings, such as the beautiful and delicate “Jellyfish,” likewise connect what the artist has coined as “bipolar oppositions,” linking the fragility of floating into the unknown and the strength of the resolution that may eventually come from that confusion.
Though perhaps contradictory, the conflicting messages in her pieces are reflective of another message Gordon tries to convey through her art. By creating a duality in the themes behind her work, she maintains a certain state of flux in her pieces, forming the basis for a second underlying theme: transition.
“It’s about going into the unknown and not knowing how you’re going to get there, but just moving forward,” she said.
But Gordon, who took her first ever art history class at Carleton University before doing her master’s degree in fine art at the New York Academy of Art, also said while she always has a certain theme in mind for her work, many of her paintings leave lots of room for interpretation.
“I like the idea that a lot of the pieces are not in your face, they’re sort of vague,” she said. “I always like that people can hopefully read into them and bring them into their life, even find stuff that I wasn’t even intending.”
“Maybe they might find stuff that I was intending you know, but somehow it’ll be a parallel in their mind that’ll somehow ring true.”
This exhibition runs until Oct. 13.
