We will be looking at the work of Scottish artist Janice McNab who is exhibiting a new series of paintings, in her first solo show at doggerfisher since 2001.
McNab takes the term, ‘chocolate box painting’ and its supposed suggestion of bad taste, literally. She has used the plastic moulded trays found inside chocolate boxes as the starting point for her paintings. Unassuming plastic, mass-produced packaging melds into strange landscapes. Perspective shifts and the ambiguous dips, troughs and peaks masquerade as mountainous terrain, sometimes suggesting a lunar landscape with perilous ravines and moody lakes.
McNab is very strongly preoccupied with the nature of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ and how we experience images in these terms. Working from research photographs that she takes herself and, spending a lot of time looking at and thinking about other images, she seeks to find the exact building blocks of the kinds of images we understand to represent the ‘real’.
We are delighted that Janice McNab will be joining us to discuss her exploration of this territory of the so-called ‘chocolate box painting’.
