FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13th, 2005
By Jeff Alten

Muskoka Place Gallery

Audrey Jolly’s “Inner Landscapes” opened this Saturday at the Muskoka Place Gallery. To Jolly, the act of painting is not one of ideas, it is an act of discovery. Her paintings possess a fascinating duality: they convey both unique harmony and underlying tension.

Jolly’s distinctive style is undoubtedly influenced by her diverse background, which includes psychology with a private therapy practice in Toronto and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York, focusing on the visual and performance arts. Jolly has met success not only as a painter, but as a dancer, a choreographer, a teacher, a mask-maker, and many other artistic ventures. All of these disciplines are drawn together in Jolly’s artwork: her paintings are a materialization of the unlikely coupling of the physical and non-physical, the spontaneous and contrived.

Jolly searches for life’s drama in the skies and land. For Jolly, life is feeling, and feeling creates movement. Her canvases are full of life as the drama of her psychological “inner landscapes” are discovered as dynamic orchestrations of colour applied to the canvas. Her landscapes possess a “primordial freshness” where the authenticity of creation comes through uncovering the natural essence of the painting, and not by placing “our” laws on it.

These discovered “inner landscapes” have a “natural” self-organizing composition to them, where the paints separate or mix as if the canvases were two dimensional tests tubes, where the weight and properties of sky and land inherently find their place.

While Jolly’s paintings are about life, movement and spontaneity, you can’t speak of one side and not have the other. While most of the works posses unparalleled vibrancy, the other side of Jolly’s work is one of stillness. This stillness manifests itself in such works “Ghost House”, where a haunted house is set at the forefront of the canvas, complimented by a background of evocative greys and browns. Other paintings feature silhouetted, barren trees juxtaposed against a vibrant sky. Jolly accentuates both the presence and the lack of life in objects as they float aimlessly and separate, on top of the fluidity of colours in motion. Jolly’s psychological “inner landscapes” breathe a theatrical vitality into landscape painting, and will be on display until August 24th.

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