25 November to 22 December 2010

Thomas Chisholm
White Paintings

Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present Thomas Chisholm’s first solo show with the gallery.  Chisholm is interested in the unique space within paintings, and in the theoretical potential of the visual contemplation of these spaces.

“My practice is concerned with objects that create and operate under their own systems of space and time.  The paintings function as an inquiry into these systems and our methods of understanding them. The paradoxes within the work act to call our knowledge of the space surrounding the painting into question. Consequently the painting acts as a window into the work’s space-time and as a point of reflection on the space-time that the work inhabits

In these works the process of making a painting imbues the work with illusionary space and time. The work is created in a single session through layering of wet on wet marks. The immediacy of the painting acts with the sustained systematic elements within a group of works to suggest both the capturing of a unique moment and the temporal gap which lies between each painting. This process also creates a complex painted space within the work, removing any compositional point of focus and instead supplying pockets of indeterminable space. These pockets have no clear exit, and viewers are constantly repelled from the rear of this space back to the top layers and into the paintings environment.”    – Thomas Chisholm

Thomas Chisholm is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA) and the University of Victoria (MFA).  He has received national attention and in 2008 was the winner of the BMO 1st Art Award for Nova Scotia.  Recent exhibitions include Positive Negative (solo exhibition) at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2008), 6 at the University of Victoria (2010) and RAW at Deluge Contemporary Art (2009).