In her work, Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology and memory. Her paintings are arrangements assembled from various fragments: outtakes from painting’s history, elements from her own snapshots, colour notes, memory. Each painting is both an invention and a response to place that she knows and has recorded. She is interested in how location or landscape can trigger memory; akin to how painting readily conjures its own past. This history reveals how aesthetics, among other factors, have operated to tame nature into landscape, and the artifice and assumptions underlying this error.

Tap’s work has been exhibited at The Painting Center (NYC), the Canadian Embassy (Washington, D.C.), Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Dispari & Dispari Projects (Italy) , Oakville Galleries (ON),), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), London Regional Art and Historical Museum (London, ON), and Margaret Thatcher Projects (NYC). Her works are included in many private and public collections including Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (NYC, Berlin), Canada House, (London, UK), Bank of Montréal, TELUS, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts, ESSO Imperial Oil Canada , CIBC Mellon, University of Toronto, Würth Collection (Germany), and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Originally from Alberta, Monica Tap completed her BFA and MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is a Professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, and is currently based in Toronto.