ICONIC CANADA

ICONIC CANADA comprises a collection of digital paintings loosely originating from the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company blankets the artist annually took to summer camp as a young boy.

Over time, the Hudson’s Bay Company point blankets have come to operate as a kind of national brand. The motifs are embedded with centuries of Canadian folklore from the time the Courier de Bois first bartered with Canada’s First Nations. Glazer has extracted, and abstracted this underlying iconography as the point of departure for his latest digital paintings on aluminum.

As objects, Glazer’s paintings have an uncanny quality. On one hand, they suggest contemporary cultures’ residual relationship to its past, while on the other hand, they are works that deconstruct specific meaning through the technology of image production. The resultant compositions oscillate between recognizable iconographic references and the unrecognizable form of colour field paintings.

This convergence of digital and fabrication technologies with art, culture, and commerce, produces the phenomenological affect unique to Glazer’s work.

CARLA GARNET

Curator