Tap goes on the road, shows us the view

The timing couldn’t have been more apropos.

It’s the middle of May with the Victoria Day long weekend approaching. People everywhere are eager to shake off their winter scales and get camping. To get from here to there, there is only the open road as you drive through the countryside, passing forests and lakes along the way.

For Monica Tap, these fleeting images are fortuitous impressions of life in progress. Everything is blurry, dream-like but still so vivid and easily ingrained in memory. She has developed a series of six large format oil paintings derived from stills she grabbed from a 19-second video made at a significant but not quite famous location.

Last year, she travelled up a stretch of road through a spruce forest at the western end of Going to the Sun Road in Montana. The road itself was first paved almost 80 years ago and heralded in an age of ecotourism for North Americans.

Her works, as might be expected, look as if you were looking out the open window into the indecipherable woods. There are obviously trees but details are only rough. You can almost feel the breeze in your hair.

What does this say about the ephemeral quality of travel and perhaps of art itself?

“My interest is much more in the space of travel — the space of feeling suspended between one place and another — than in any particular destination,” explained the first director of Profiles Gallery (now the Art Gallery of St. Albert).

“There's something about that open space of reverie [as a passenger, more so than as a driver] that perhaps feels akin to the space of painting. In my work, I aim for a suspension of the image between abstraction and representation — so maybe that's a parallel too.”

Tap astutely makes use of modern video technology to achieve this reverie to great effect. She stated that she is interested in how painting has always responded to new technologies of image making like the camera obscura or even Cubism’s influence on early cinema. Digital technologies only provide new opportunities for art exploration in her view.

“With the advent of consumer-level digital video, one no longer needed an editing suite to see video as a sequence of frame-stills.”

The visuals are rich as well, she says, and can be very painterly especially when the camera captures lower resolution video. Her eye misses nothing.

The results are good, although expectedly repetitious. Each work has a blurred, smudged effect as if you were right there in the passenger seat staring into the transitional landscape. It’s interesting to think of her subjects as still life moments because that it is essentially what they are. There is so much motion in them that the life being shown is the farthest from being still.

The artist doesn’t want the viewer to read too much into things. She just wants them to enjoy the sights, much like that passenger in the car.

“A painting is itself initially constructed of many, many acts of looking that together determine its outcome. A viewer, in looking, joins in the conversation and participates in the making of the work. That, to me, is the whole point — the conversation.”