My recent work is comprised of a series of fictional portrait paintings in which a single figure, cropped from the shoulders up, confronts the
viewer. While they reference classical portrait painting, the paintings are in the end not converned with portraiture as a genre or with likeness to
particular individuals. Rather, it is the artifice of the pose and the act of
looking that interests me, the condition of the figure as both subject and object. The paintings are based on found images of models from the media, the remote, iconic faces that stare out at us from magazines and billboards. What attracted me to these images in the beginning was desire, the desire projected by the images and the desire I felt myself to possess them.
What became interesting to me as I pursued this project was what
happened in the attempt to translate this photographic construction into the language of painting. The photograph looks real, the painting corny, fake -— like a bad version of the photograph, a failed attempt at realism. The
photograph looks contemporary, the painting dated. The copied image
carries meaning differently and the gap between painting and photography continually opens up. It is an apt metaphor for the desire that first spawned this project, as desire is always about a distance that cannot be bridged, a distance that once closed, destroys the thing it wants. In the end, the
paintings reframe the problematics of desire, using the mechanisms of melodrama, recontextualization, scale change, and shifts of color to pose questions about these images and to test the limits of their intended
meanings.
— Janet Werner

Selected solo exhibitions: Robert Birch, Toronto; Thames Art, Chatham; Estevan National Exhibition Center, Estevan; 1999: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Art Gallery, Mississauga; Paul Kuhn, Calgary; Tableau Vivant, Toronto.
Selected group exhibitions: 2000: Beautiful Losers, Dunlop Art, Regina; 1999: Les Peintures, Rene Blouin/ Lilian Rodriguez, Montreal; Trance, Plug In Inc., Winnipeg; Ten Years Later, Contemporary Art from the Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada.