Artist

Biography- Carol Wainio

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/on-view/her-story-today/

This was the Artist Biography located by the Carol Wainio exhibit at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when the project was done. (Oct 2015)

She uses the slow, complicated and historically loaded medium of
painting to create both visceral and visually discursive spaces, places
where representations of past and present may meet along the road. Her
work reflects a process of drawing together diverse references: Western
History and emerging economies, scarcity and excess, long ago and far
awayall expressed through carious forms of visual representation,
encompassing everything from high art to the vernacularare explored
and reimagined in painting.Historical illustration, early advertisements
that brought folk tale characters from the farmers field of the 18th century
into emerging cities, archival or contemporary photographs, and childrens
drawings all comingle in a variety of paint grounds to probe and restage
visual narratives of transformation, desire and insecurity. These are
uneasy, layered spaces created to question, lament and wonder.
More recently, the centuries-old trope in folk tales of children
abandoned in the woods by cruel parents is explored at a time when the
technological speeding-up of lie together with the more fundamental
changes to the physical ground of our climate and environment point
towards an inability to engage in the natural world or imagine and
preserve it for future generations. Some paintings make use of
early tableau vivantversions of fairy tales like Le Petit Poucet (Hop O My
Thumb) or Hansel and Gretel. Abandoned historical figures encounter
chocolate tornadoes, birds or animals in transformation, suggesting real
rather tan story erosions of a deeper narrative, like the regularly recurring
seasons (replaced by extreme and less predictable weather events).
Contemporary seasonal markers, childrens drawings of the weather,
seasons, trees, or oil rigs, archival illustration or later photographic
reiterations, allegorical animals or birds in the process of transformation/
hybridization, all combine in unstable settings rendered in point to evoke a
kind of elegiac wonder at the nature of representation, the past and an
uncertain future.