Brenda Draney

March 7 to October 25, 2020

About the Exhibition

Brenda Draney’s paintings, with their gestural mark making and wide expanses of canvas, present fragmented narratives that stem from her personal history as a Cree woman, living in northern Alberta. A story, Draney asserts, is as much about what is left out as what is included, and her approach to painting – to record not what she sees, but what she remembers she has seen, felt or experienced – both allows for and acknowledges subjectivity. Draney is interested in what you don’t say or can’t quite articulate, and, like memories themselves, her canvases contain a constellation of elements that come together to form a picture. They are at once insistent and dreamlike. This exhibition includes earlier paintings from as early as 2009 together with a new body of work created in response to her childhood encounters with settler landscape art, in particular the iconic work White Pine, 1957, by A.J. Casson.

About the Artist

Brenda Draney is a contemporary painter who grew up living between Edmonton and Slave Lake in Northern Alberta and is Cree from Sawridge First Nation. She holds a BA in English Literature and a BFA from the University of Alberta and completed a Master of Applied Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2009, Draney won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and she was short-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2016. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Sobey Foundation, among others.

Curated by Laurel Saint-Pierre.

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