PAPER CUTS - BOTANICA

All available size:

SMALL - 19.7” x 19.7” (edition of 25)
LARGE - 40” x 40” (edition of 12)
SPECIAL EDITION ROUND FRAME - 36” x 36” - Mounted to a 3inch thick round wooden frame and finished with a resin coat. (Special request only. Edition of 7).

Toronto-based artist Anna Church has built a career out of creating unique sculptures turned into fine art prints. Her latest series, Paper Cuts, depicts compositions that Church has rendered to create frozen temporal moments in a process that is Church’s most painterly to date, developed utilizing her strength for arrangement and styling. Real objects have been combined with photographs and reshot, creating a waterfall effect that leaves the viewer to determine the exact nature of what they are examining.

By blurring the boundaries between nostalgia and surrealism, the new reality of these artworks juxtaposes the nature of authenticity and even memory.

Church started experimenting with how she could manipulate light, colour and scale through collage, resulting in this visual investigation of how an observer relates to a moment frozen in time. Her photographs of her own collages render the viewer’s relationship to the subject matter one step removed, a distance that challenges a typical relationship to the essence of photography while simultaneously reinterpreting Anna’s overriding technique: in all her series’ the artwork is a capture of a moment in time before it is disassembled.

Each ‘Paper Cut’ in question, with it’s differentiated light sources and composition, was inspired by the window light reflected in historical dutch still life paintings and theories referenced by French philosopher Hypolite Taine’s work: “Holland’s flat horizons have little to offer. The air is always hazy, which makes all the contours blurred and indistinct. It’s the small touches that matter most...what we notice are the nuances, the contrasts, the values and tonality of the colours. The shades of brightness and the gradations of colour are
astonishing... a delight to the eye”.

In this series, Church seeks to emulate the changing nuances of a particular place, of a specific time and day while considering the content of each collage.