Bio:

Cara Guri is a visual artist based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and has completed a painting residency at Columbia University. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Takao Tanabe Scholarship, the Brissenden Scholarship, and the Bishop’s Undergraduate Prize in Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include The Reach Gallery Museum and Burrard Arts Foundation.

Statement:

My work explores the transactional nature of portraiture and image. I am interested in the balance between consumption and denial in painting: the information that is given to the viewer and that which is withheld. Frequently using my own body as a reference, I explore self-image as an extended object and how the tropes of historical portraiture define and negate identity.

My practice examines how visual meaning changes with time, process, and translation. My works respond to the conventions of traditional Western figure painting in relation to my own space and time. I use my paintings to play with symbols and themes from historical portraiture by replacing or recontextualizing conventional visual elements and devices, disrupting and altering their substance, sparking new dialogue and meaning. My paintings place a barrier between the viewer and the subject, questioning the role of portraiture and the conventional dynamics of the gaze.

The slippery boundary between the seen and unseen, known and unknown, and literal and psychological space is at the root of my practice. Each painting contemplates the dynamics of viewership and what it means to look and to see. The depicted subjects are partially concealed from the viewer, denying full access to these figures, foregrounding objects, spaces, and other parts of the body over the face. The conventional hierarchy of features is questioned and the subject retains a piece of their experience for themselves. What and who a portrait is for is called into question as is the relationship between subject and viewer.

I am interested in the relative slowness of painting as a platform for consideration. I use the process of creating a piece to observe, consider, decode, and recode the encounters that I have with myself and the outside world, and to question what it means to see and be seen.

www.caraguri.com