The Times, 1986

Carol Wainio has exhibited nationally including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, National Gallery of Canada, Glenbow Museum, and internationally at the Venice Biennale, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Stedelijk Museum, and Beijing Biennale.  Her paintings are held in major public, corporate, and private collections. She completed an MFA at Concordia University and has held academic positions at the University of Ottawa and Concordia University. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art and Trepanier Baer Gallery, her work draws together diverse visual and cultural references in a discursive approach that is also visceral and painterly, creating structures for wondering about representation, history and narrative within the current physical and cultural climate. She lives and works in Ottawa and Montréal.

Artist Statement

My paintings draw together diverse sources:  Historical illustration, its forgotten offshoots in early advertising or postcards, archival or contemporary photographs, 17^th century genre painting or children’s drawings meet and mingle in paint grounds to investigate or re-stage older narratives of transformation and desire, catastrophe and miraculous escape, scarcity and excess – in a discursive, visceral wondering about history, representation, narrative, and experience in the current physical and cultural climate.

Earlier work explored the ‘shrinking of experience’ and disenchantment described by Walter Benjamin. Informed by archival research in how popular images were reproduced and repurposed over centuries, it worked with figures like the 17^th century Chat Botté who reversed the fortunes of his peasant master at a time when any change derived representational power from its impossibility at a time of hierarchy, custom, sumptuary law, and scarcity – something we, as socially mobile consumers of images and things, only dimly imagine. Through time, these figures appear as a hinge pivoting back and forward from a past where change was impossible, to one where it was achieved through commodities and its aura diminished. As social mobility increased, early folk tale figures found new roles marketing smaller changes in status. 

Abandoned in the wood by selfish elders, Le Petit Poucet saved his siblings with new flashlights or early automobiles in later repurposings of Perrault’s story. As in Hansel and Gretel, the trope of future generations abandoned to their fate resonates in a time of climate change. And in the real world it is left to a young girl with braids named Greta to lead the fight against the’ ‘fairy tale’ of unsustainable growth.

Fable’s animals were less likely to be repurposed selling shoes or cars; they expressed enduring human characteristics and expressed moral dilemmas dispassionately. But as the ground has shifted in the Anthropocene in a way likely unimaginable to Aesop or Jean de la Fontaine, their voices now echo strangely and plaintively. Oppositions of hubris/diligence or fast/slow of The Tortoise and the Hare resonate differently now. In recent work, dangling hares from 17^th century genre paintings of dead game may be rotated and re-animated to race with children’s drawings or other tortoise iterations and the hope they may offer at a time when we seem to be sliding back to folk tale and fabulism – when public discourse, overtaken by wildly false, anti-science, ‘populist’ narratives, makes fable’s discourse seem oddly sane, and when fairy tale tropes resurface in rhetoric by and about golden-haired princes or presidents in golden towers. The disenchanted identify with familiar figures from the past. “Unprecedented” political representational modes have precedents in fairy tale and its images – which I wonder about.

Fairy tale transformations also echo in contemporary art. Though long detached from traditional narrative it remains defined by the fantastic possibilities embedded in its ‘story’. The transformation of straw into gold, of the reviled or valueless into something of great value, occurs in the manufactured scarcity of structures that echo conditions of older narratives – stories that may continue to shift and shape in the real world.

– Carol Wainio

CV

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024 “Carol Wainio’, Arsenal, New York, NY
2024 “Arts and Crafts”, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, Ontario
2023 “Réenchantement”, 1700 La Poste, Montréal, Québec (catalogue)
2022   “Vers L’incertitude”, Trépanier Baer, Calgary, Alberta
2021   “Fabulisme/Paroles aux Bêtes”, Occurrence, Montréal, Québec
2021   “Figures in a Shifting Ground”, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto
2020   “Human Natures”, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, Ontario
2019   “Disasters for Little Children”, Diefenbunker, Ottawa, Ontario
2016   “The Fall”, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, Ontario
2014   “Dropped from the Calendar”, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto
2014   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, Galerie UQAM, Montréal, Quebec
2013   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, MacIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario
2013   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan
2013   “Old Masters”, curated by Crystal Mowry, Kitchener/Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, Ontario
2013   “Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future (again)” Paul Petro Contemporary, Toronto
2013   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC
2012   “Folk Tales”, Durham Art Gallery, Durham, Ontario
2011   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2011   Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, Québec
2011   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, Varley Art Gallery, Markham, Ontario (touring)
2010   Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
2010   “The Book”, curated by Diana Nemiroff, Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario
2008   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2007   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2006   Galerie René Blouin, Montréal, Québec
2004   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2003   Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia
2003   Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario
2002   “Days Arrayed”, Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2001   Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
2001   “Les Registres du Contemporain/Contemporary Registers”, Touring Exhibition, Musée d’art de Joliette 2000; Oakville, Ontario 2001, London, Ontario 2001, Calgary 2001
2000   “Le Livre, La Livrée”, Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1999   Galerie Rochefort, Montréal, Québec
1998   “Persistent Images”, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Ontario
1996   “Operating Theatre”, Galerie Rochefort, Montréal, Québec
1995   S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1993   S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1991   Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1991   S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1990   Galerie Chantal Boulanger, Montréal, Québec
1989   Galerie d’art du Centre Culturel de l’Université de Sherbrooke, Québec

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024  “Art School Confidential”, Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario
2020   “Painting Nature with a Mirror”, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal
2018   “Adisòkàmagan/We all become stories”, Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario
2017   “Tributes and Tributaries”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario
2015   “Elles Aujourd’hui”, Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, Montréal, Québec
2015   6^th Beijing International Art Biennale, Beijing, China
2015   “Un Pays de Merveilles”, Galerie Roger Bellemare, Montréal, Québec
2014   “GGAVMA 2014”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
2014   “In a Word”, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montréal, Québec (catalogue)
2013   Toronto International Art Fair, (Paul Petro Contemporary), Toronto, Ontario
2013   “History Becomes You”, Paul Petro Contemporary, Toronto, Ontario
2013   “Other Worlds”, curated by Patrick Macaulay, Harbourfront Center, Toronto, Ontario
2013   “Project Peinture/The Painting Project”, Galerie UQAM, Montréal, Québec (catalogue)
2012   “Menaginary”, Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta
2012   “60 Painters”, Humber College, Toronto, Ontario
2011   “Between the Cracks”, Oboro, Montréal, Québec
2011   “25 ans”, Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, Québec
2010   “Femmes artistes”, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City
2009   Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary
2009   Storylines (with Ron Shuebrook), Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax (catalogue)
2008   Through the Looking Glass, Glenbow Museum, Calgary
2008   “Carte Blanche”, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (catalogue)
2008   “Carol Wainio, Ron Moppet, Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary
2008   “Build-Up”, Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario
2006   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2005   Contemporary Galleries, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
2002   “Painters 15”, Shanghai Art Museum, China (2002); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario
2002   Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
2000   Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1999   “Les Peintures”, Galeries René Blouin, Montréal, Québec
1999   Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
1998   “Peinture/Peinture”, Belgo Building, Montréal, Québec
1997   “Blaast”, Galerie Rochefort, Montréal, Québec
1995   “A Notion of Conflict – Contemporary Canadian Art”, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1994   “Shirley Wiitasalo, Carol Wainio”, Galerie Rochefort, Montréal, Québec.
1993   “Reflecting Paradise”, Expo ’93, Taejon, South Korea
1993   “Perspectives in Contemporary Art”, Centre D’Exposition Du Vieux Palais, St. Jerome, Québec
1992   “Vues d’Ensembles”, Centre Internationale d’Art Contemporain, Montréal.
1991   Anninovanta, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy (catalogue)
1991   “Working Truths/Powerful Fictions”, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan (catalogue)
1990   “Aperto”, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (catalogue)
1990   “S.L. Simpson Gallery, 1980-1990”, S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
1989   “Ludger Gerdes, Serge Murphy, Carol Wainio”, 49th Parallel, New York, NY.
1988   “Les Temps Chauds”, Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, Québec (catalogue)
1988   “The Ninth Dalhousie Drawing Exhibition”, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, N.S.
1988   “Contemporary Canadian Works on Paper”, Concordia Art Gallery, Montréal.
1986   Group Show, The Willard Gallery, New York, New York.
1986   “Songs of Experience”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario (catalogue)
1986   “City Detour”, Optica, Montréal, Québec.
1985   “Anxiety/Alienation/Aphasia”, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta.
1985   “Ecrans Politiques”, Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, Québec (catalogue)
1985   “Contemporary Canadian Painting”, Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
1985   “Perspective ’85”, (two-person show), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario (catalogue)

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

National Gallery of Canada, Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario, Glenbow Museum, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, University of Lethbridge, Hart House/University of Toronto, London Regional Art Gallery, Air Canada, Lavalin, Chase Manhattan Bank, CIL, McCarthy Tetrault, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, Royal Bank, Toronto Dominion, External Affairs, Canada Council Art Bank, other public, private, corporate collections

SOURCE: carolwainio.com