PRESS RELEASE
The paintings in the exhibition are from Tap’s Grand Riverseries. The paintings respond to the 19th century pastoral painter Homer Watson’s 1879 trip down the Grand River. Tap’s series of video-based paintings rework the tradition of landscape painting through their engagement with video source images. Tap took her own trip down the river accompanied by her digital camera. She captured the landscape with the low-resolution video of a digital camera and distilled it into a series of still images. Multiple stills were then combined and projected onto the canvas and then the artist reacted to the stills in paint. Likewise, the Road to Lily Dalepaintings in the exhibition come from footage of the drive to the Spiritualist center in upstate New York visited by Watson during his lifetime.
Tap’s paintings bring together past and present, dead and living. The exhibition raises questions of place, time and authorship. Working in the dark, using video images as source material, Tap reminds us that the medium of paint is haunted by its history.