White Room: Jane Corrigan

White Columns is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by the New York-based Canadian artist Jane Corrigan.

Corrigan’s installation in White Columns’ Project space consists of six recent paintings drawn from a larger body of work produced over the past six months. Corrigan’s modestly scaled oil paintings, typically no larger than 20” x 22”, depict scenes drawn from the artist’s imagination that simultaneously invoke art history and popular culture.The scenarios in Corrigan’s paintings unfold in a hard-to-determine era, a somewhat slippery time zone that invokes Pieter Bruegel the Edler’s genre scenes as much as Walt Disney’s animated realities. Corrigan’s confusion of time (and place) affords her work a paradoxically timeless quality.In many of Corrigan’s paintings her subjects – often blue-collar workers – are engaged in fundamental, everyday activities: e.g. laborers on their way to work, moving boulders, or taking a siesta between shifts. In other works the figure of the artist appears, often engaged in the self-reflexive act of painting.Throughout her work Corrigan takes great risks with her engagement with humor, allowing it to surface whilst also deftly holding it in check, never allowing the comedic to undermine the evident seriousness of her art.Seen together Corrigan’s paintings suggest a constantly unfolding yet fragmentary narrative, a story with no beginning or end, a fictional realm brought into life through the act and materiality of painting.

Jane Corrigan (b. 1980) is a New York-based Canadian artist. She is currently a 2012-13 resident of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA. She received a MFA from Purchase College S. U. N. Y. in 2009, and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 2003.