With this series, Tap has pushed her exploration of the territory between landscape and abstraction to surprising new ends.

Present as always, is Tap’s characteristically personal take on nature that both defies and honours the tradition of Canadian landscape painting. Using unlikely colours and unusual perspectives, Tap presents a series of individual trees rendered with an expressionistic take on 19th century instructional-style tree illustrations. In Tap’s paintings, these trees exist more like interpretations, preserving their contemporary integrity by positioning themselves between the familiar and the strange.

In the larger works we see a shift from singular depictions to tangled, piled, and repeated motifs. Each canvas offers a collage of modular and make-shift landscapes that seamlessly combine the organic with the human-made. There is a bizarre and beautiful presence in these living portraits that surfaces as a sort of fantasy of record-taking and pattern-making. Bushes, bouquets, grasses, and spontaneous shrines, all offer a very human intermingling of nature, magic, and mourning.

Monica Tap is a Toronto-based artist who has exhibited in Canada, England and the USA. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant for her project, “Translation as a Strategy of Renewal in Painting.” Tap’s work is represented in collections including BMO, TDBank, Canada House, the Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Alberta Art Foundation. Originally from Alberta, she completed both her BFA and MFA degrees at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Toronto and is a Professor at the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.