Bio

Dana Edmonds has a multidisciplinary practice that is balanced between painting and graphic + web design. Born in Montreal, where she currently lives and works, Dana received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in fine arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax (1990). She has also studied Graphic Design at Dawson College and Art Education at McGill University. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the US, including One Earth, One Chance at the Rebecca Gallery, Toronto (2016), Show Your World at Gallery MC New York, New York (2016), the Ontario Society of Artists Exhibition at Neilson Park Creative Centre, Toronto (2016) and I am NSCAD at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2015). She is a recent recipient of an award from the Canada Council for the Arts to produce a series of new paintings.

Artist Statement

Dana Edmonds uses oil paint to explore different forms of urban waste and to study the relationship between overuse and its effects on mental health issues, namely addiction, hoarding, anxiety, and depression. Dana's new series, a collection of signs, texts and symbols, takes on a chaotic allure, like an assemblage. Forming a relationship between nature and culture, these images reflect consumption patterns in different times and spaces and the physical reality of everyday life.

This new series renegotiates painting as being part of a reactive commentary on environmental issues and representations of nature in contemporary society. Demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘materialistic world’ through these landscapes, Looking to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but rather are based on subjective associations and formal parallels. Working from digital photographs rather than actual memory, Dana's process further enhances and questions this aesthetic of distance. How intimately do we know our surroundings? What do we choose to ignore? What is valued versus what gets thrown away? By exploring the concept of converting the grotesque into the beautiful, drawing attention to these questions and concerns inciting the viewer to make new personal associations between art, everyday life and mass culture.