Taralee Guild

Education & Formation

1984

Born Thunder Bay, Ontario

Age 12

Inherited Grandma Ethel's paint box and easel

First still life — beginning of lifelong painting practice

2010

BFA Visual Arts — Emily Carr University of Art and Design

Vancouver, BC

Studio

Full-time painter — Vancouver, British Columbia

The Airstreams Series

Subject

Mid-century aluminum trailers — Airstreams, Spartanettes, Westfalias

Photographs taken at vintage trailer rallies; travels to Pismo Beach CA

Theory

Bataillean Surrealism — animal mimicry, doubled imagery, formlessness

Trailer hides in surroundings through reflection — camouflage logic

Self-portrait

Each reflection is a micro self-portrait — faceless, elongated, disembodied

Distorted fun-house mirror: "an odd disembodied gaze"

Lineage

Post-WWII aerodynamics — Art Deco design — Primitivism

Hyper-realism that collapses into the hallucinatory

Nature’s Cathedral Series

Origin

Raymond Carver's story "Cathedral" (1983)

Man cannot describe a cathedral to a blind person — then loses himself in overwhelming feeling

Epiphany

Rothko's No. 16, 1957 — National Gallery

Same dematerialization as cathedral architecture — structure becomes intangible

Subject

BC old-growth forest canopies — Stanley Park — Cathedral Grove

Photographed from below — vertical expansion of light, space, colour

Lineage

Emily Carr — Lawren Harris — Group of Seven — Gordon Smith

Compositions spiral into abstraction referencing West Coast First Nations design

Collections & Record

Collections

International private and public collections

Galleries

JG Art Gallery — Bainbridge Island & Park City

Mayberry Fine Art — Winnipeg

Sold

Work on Artsy — sold through JGO Galleries Park City + Bainbridge Island

Critical Context

Hyper-realism

Strictly follows photographs — finds stranger imagery than invention allows

Randomness of the real exceeds what the mind organizes

Dematerialization

Old-growth forest as cathedral — light + space + transparent colour

Hagia Sophia (Istanbul) cited as the architectural model of the phenomenon

Surrealism

Formlessness, camouflage, the uncanny in domestic/suburban objects

Mundane setting made frightening by imaginary space in the reflection

Works at JG

Range

12 works — Airstreams and Nature’s Cathedral

Skyward Apparitions · Sleepy Spartanettes · Downtown Tofino Airstream · Paris Cathedral · Duck Creek