Tanya Cunnington
"Tanya Cunnington" by Donald Brackett, Summer 2007, p. 102
Sometimes painting’s future depends upon acknowledging its past. Some artists are able to do this with greater aplomb than others, and Tanya Cunnington, a youthful practitioner, does it better than most. A 2001 graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, she has resisted the urge of so many of its alumni to abandon pigments for pixels.
Imagine a boxing match between Hans Hofmann and Robert Rauschenberg refereed by Kurt Schwitters and you’ll get a general idea of her work. In “time. traveler.,” her show at Loop Gallery, she managed to somehow channel all three masters while maintaining a grip on her own idiosyncratic territory. Her refreshingly messy paintings are time travellers in a very real way: they find new means to convey the fugitive nature of contemporary painting while still sheltering a tactile tenderness that belongs to both its ancient and its modernist histories.
Cunnington, an admitted romantic, is fascinated by painting’s capacity to convey the passage of time and its effects, both perceptual and conceptual. Her interest in cities as repositories of memory and lost time has taken a turn away from representation and towards abstraction. The built structures of urban life, especially their geometric and stacked outlines, are her principal motifs. Her mixed-media canvases radiate the inherent energy of carefully controlled chaos, accident and debris. The smallest pieces work perfectly well not just as so-called small paintings but also as vertiginous compositions in their own right. The larger works, some of them gorgeously rumpled, merely multiply and amplify that ironic pleasure.
Using a frenzied combination of raw canvas, exhausted brush strokes, graphic gestural markings, creased collages of old, yellowing wallpaper, fading but still elegant Japanese paper and the quotidian data trapped in daily newspapers, Cunnington manages to create paintings that coalesce as a perfect balance of the hopeful formation of memory and its doomed disintegration.
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