Tanya Morand’s silkscreen prints and mixed-media works on paper allow us to amble through the architecture, streets, parks, squares and promenades of various cities. Mixing architecture, urban scenes and nature the artist creates images splitting and cutting into curves and contours spiral, leaf and petal shapes, creating heterogeneous and imaginary scenes. Depicting pedestrians, dancers, cyclists and skateboarders, the imagery contrasts urban density with the openness of public spaces and parks. Made of composite and non-linear views, these poetic and dreamlike scenes give the impression that one can pass freely from one space to another. As the artist Gordon Matta-Clark said, it is sufficient to imagine a new space, to cut through the familiar and transform cities.
With drawing and painting as the base of her practice, Tanya Morand also does photography, printmaking, works with light, and creates installations. Her most recent silkscreen prints fragment her drawings of cities into botanical motifs, splits and arabesques. Intending to evoke porosity between what is human and spatial or architectural, these images resonate with multiple experiences, contrasting the monumental and vernacular, the sublime and strange, and the opulent and abandoned.
Wanting to recreate with silkscreen the spontaneous act of cutting up photos for collages with scissors, Tanya Morand developed a methodology with silkscreen printing that transforms this act into a gesture with brushstrokes. Blocking around the edges her rectangular drawings previously burned onto the silk screen with liquid screen block, she transforms the contours into geometric and organic forms, changing the shapes at least twice between layers of printing. She prints these silkscreen mono-prints layering and juxtaposing the positive and negative drawings of urban scenes with various colours and black, interweaving different scenes and then adds other layers of colour and form with ink and paint.
Biography, Tanya Morand
Born in Montreal, Tanya Morand completed her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and Master’s degree in Painting at Concordia University. Represented by Galerie.a in Quebec, the gallery has featured her work in three solo exhibitions as well as at the art fairs Art Toronto PAPIER and PLURAL in Montreal, and FAAQ 2022 in Quebec City. In the past Morand’s work was represented by the galleries Waddington and Gorce and Lieu Ouest in Montreal, and Carl Davis in Ottawa. Her works have been presented across Canada at numerous exhibition venues including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, the Center d’exposition / Musée Louise Carrier in Lévis. As well, her work has been exhibited at at Brita Prinz Arte and Espacio de creacion Quinta del in Madrid, Cross Street Arts in the UK and at the 10th and 11th World Print Triennial of Chamalières in France. Morand’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Musée des beaux arts de Sherbrooke in 2025. The artist has participated in several artistic residencies and has been awarded grants from the C.A.C. SODEC and CALQ. Her works have been purchased by numerous private and public collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. An active member of Engramme since 2016, she has also been a teacher at CÉGEP Champlain Saint Lawrence since 1998.