LURE

Lure is a set of 4 paintings and 4 prints which also exists as a catalogue/artist book. This booklet accompanied the exhibition of the paintings at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, 1988.

"With increasing urgency, l've found myself questioning how to paint without demonstrating complicity with painting's patriarchal tradition. With these four texts and their accompanying paintings, I am attempting to reveal and fracture aspects of that tradition by taking a deconstructive and metaphorical approach. Painting has enormous authority as an art form, and rests as an emblem of art practice in general. Painting has also become emblematic of the concepts of autonomy, uniqueness, and individuality. I feel that it is necessary to reveal some of this implicit historical hierarchy in order to be able to claim painting as a viable territory for an alternative set of values which are not primarily defined within patriarchy.
Four paintings face four texts across the space of the gallery, setting up a dialogue and a dichotomy between text and image.
Each text describes how to make a kind of generic abstract painting. However, each of these descriptive texts is interrupted by passages of an evocative and personal nature. This textual intervention is intended as a mirroring of the subjective aspects of the paintings, giving the installation a unity which ultimately contradicts the fracturing of the text/painting juxtaposition."

Allyson Clay
June, 1988.