For Angela Lane, abstract art offers endless opportunities to explore the world without being confined to obvious narratives. This is especially important to her as she studies the concept of hybridity.

“Hybrid painting is one that reinterprets given historical boundaries by reflecting on contemporary concerns and attitudes in the organization and generation of visual experiences,” she explained.

Artists like Braque and Picasso, she continued, set precedents in their printed media and incorporated objects right into the works. She calls this an early form of sampling “which is now a familiar process of re-contextualizing a visual element from its original source into a new situation that enhances its particular quality while creating a new network of meanings or questions.”

The implications of this practice are larger than one might assume.

“Our time is characterized by the use of technologies and globalization in making the world and our interpretations of it,” she said. “It has accelerated people’s desires to macerate the limits of traditions and has altered our perceptions.”

Her work is a series of colour shapes that make use of negative space to define themselves. These wall hung objects make the eye work to focus on anything specific. Rather, the viewer will likely find a wandering focus where all of the points of interest blend into one another like words without spaces, the colours and shapes each providing punctuation for a sentence that doesn’t really end.

They are endlessly entertaining and meditative.

“It becomes a negotiation of in-betweenness. This is a strategy at the centre of contemporary creativity,” Lane said.

Lane’s collage-like works force the viewer to overcome art. Her intention, she said, is more about asking visual questions about the broader world in general, especially as she broaches the subject of super-hybridity, a concept that refers to the art that comes as a result of the merging of computers and globalization, a world where everything needs to happen immediately but where images are fleeting.

“The esthetics results of super-hybridity seem to be about accelerating the amalgamation of sources and contexts to an extent that they are atomized and transformed into the seed of the next idea.”

She ended by saying that she hopes to “expand the boundaries of painting, pushing it towards a more ‘super-hybrid’ experience. This work is painting on canvas, which moves towards sculpture and installation all in the same experience.”

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