Jennifer Dorner’s installation, Sky Vessels, features a collection of paintings forming a large grid (each panel 122 cm x 122 cm).  

At first sight: sky and subtle clouds - the painting’s ground acts like the banal sights along a highway, dominating the visual field. Then, like brief flashes: a flying rocket, spaceship, cheerleader with pompons, inflatable tent and tugboat travel in the vast sky. Here, objects of leisure activity stand-in for an instant where a brief flash of the uncanny disrupts monotony, passive moments when a traveler hovers between two places, of departure and arrival.

Dorner’s work is inflenced by the sky and by social spaces. Key concepts include artifice and display and how these can create atmospheric space with painting. As a juncture, the small and detailed representation of leisure activity combined with transport vehicles acts as the catalyst for disrupting the painting field. The use of humour - the uncanny - within the pictorial narrative introduces a subtle, but complex compositional language. In short, the artist is building an artificial sky, panel by panel with minuscule elements that highlight the bizarre attributes of recreational and leisure activities in western culture.

Jennifer Dorner is multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She completed her BFA at the University of Ottawa in 1997 and her MFA at the University of Western Ontario in 2001. She is the recipient of several grants and awards and her work has been exhibited in group shows across Canada. When she is not making art, she enjoys teaching and advocating for the arts. She has taught at the University of Western Ontario, Dundas Valley School of Art and has a strong background in artist-run culture. She is currently national director of the Independant Media Arts Alliance. www.jenniferdorner.deLa Centrale Galerie Powerhouse thanks her members, volunteers and her public, as well as the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal and Les brasseurs RJ.