My Hair Tangles with Sweetgrass, Strawberries Stain My Hands
Rylee Taje
See it On Campus: Level 1
Mackenzie Award in Painting — Honourable Mention
Working through refigured landscapes, my oil paintings explore emotional intimacy and friction created through physical distance from my subject. My work is informed by my ancestral ties to the land of Treaty six and questions how I, as an artist, can speak to an audience who is not corporally present. I seek to complicate longing and memory through regarding my documented moments of home and transforming them into a theoretical space. This balance of memory, observation, as well as emotional and material reimagining generates direct visual imagery of Treaty six, and an ambiguous layer of cultural recollection.
My work is activated by my use of limited and monochrome colour palettes. Colour in my paintings work to create an environment that plays with the bounds of familiarity. My use of colour and ambiguity also considers the relationship between the subject and the viewer. By painting my subject using fluid brushstrokes, soft contrast and monochrome palettes, a level of obscurity is generated intentionally as a means to protect the subject material, allowing the painting and its content to have a conceptual opacity. This practice works to communicate memory and land, while ensuring that my subject maintains autonomy through the limiting of full, intrusive access from the unintended audience. Thus my paintings allow for the viewer to investigate the layers of transparencies and opacities, beckoning for a slower read and for a viewers body to lean towards the artwork with squinted eyes trying to read or view what is disguised, pushed forward, or held back.
An Offering, 42″ x 36″, Oil on Canvas
The Mud Grips At My Feet, 42″ x 36″, Oil on Canvas
Using both canvas and animal hide as my surfaces alongside oil paints as my medium I am a collaborator with my studio and research how my material partners can be empowered through application and use. Practices of layering, wiping away, and blatantly applying paint showcase the characteristics of the materials and stretch predominant understanding of tools, turning to view every working item as a partner who supports my investigation of non-static understandings. The movement of a brush alongside the mixture of oil paint, odourless mineral spirits, and linseed oil has a kinetic energy of care as each moment is a meeting of my hands, the mediums, communal prayers, and the surface.
I do not work towards creating a linear narrative that leads to a closure rather I allow space for the facets of what has shaped my positionally and understanding of what has surrounded mine and my family’s life. I have always thought of what I do as a love letter to my mother and my maternal family and ancestors, a coded space that is focused on being understood by Indigenous peoples who come from similar understandings and teachings as myself and those who work through ideas of movement and distance. Much like my practice of layering paint, I layer meaning and knowledge–hoping that no matter how deep or relaxed a read, there will be a questioning of where my paintings are theoretically located and who they call forth.
