Drawing + Painting |

A bird, a dog

Marina Levit

See it On Campus: Level 2

ECU Award Recipient

Judith Warren Painting Award – Honourable Mention

Frisbee, 72″ x 60″, oil on canvas, 2024

Flickering between figuration and abstraction, my oil paintings explore micro narratives of the everyday through play and the cultivation of mark making and colour. My work often reflects the awkwardness and complexities of the self and life’s mundanities, as I seek to unravel ways of seeing through questioning how to simplify, complicate, contradict, and queer the forms present in my work. My paintings are generated by an interaction of opacities and transparencies, dimension and flatness, colour and form, and the play between visual directness and ambiguity. The subject matter – might that be a dog, a bird, a gesture of the body – is constantly pushing up against the visceral experience of paint and colour as material. In this way, my paintings toy between restraint and release- the ambiguities and indeterminacies that arise from this serve to reject a presumed stagnancy of identity and the rigidity of social structures.

Beyond Our Own Immediacy, 48” x 60”, oil on canvas, 2024

Bird and Bike, 54” x 42”, oil on canvas, 2023

Through the play with the materiality of paint, the forms and subject matter present in my work is at once directly considered as well as released away from itself. My interest in abstraction lies in confronting and engaging with the parts of myself and my paintings that are obscured away from the self – not in an effort to expose, rather to hold space for these indeterminacies. My work exists in a state of questioning as a manner of being, rather than a means to an end.

Such moments of ambiguity in my work can be characterized as a form of queering the painting. Queerness and non-binary identity can be reframed beyond sexuality and gender, but as a mode of existing in this world that is strange, fluid, ambiguous, reinventive, contradictory, multifaceted, translucent, opaque, and in full colour. Queer formalisms manifest in my paintings through my reimagining of space and perspective, my insistence on full colour, and the openness of brushstroke. Colour serves as a distinctive subject matter in my work, as I remain in constant conversation with colour as material in my process. I question when to deliver the pleasure of boisterous, noisy high chrome encounters, and when to find a more subtle, withheld, and nuanced relationship to colour. Through the activation of colour and form, my paintings explore the everyday in order to gesture towards a queer elsewhere within the minutiae.