Red Composition Painting

ARTIST Evan Steenson is an emerging Canadian conceptual artist who works in digital media. He is a member of the 1313 Gallery and lives and works in Toronto. OUTPUT Avoiding formalism and representation, Evans compositions present us with a renegotiation of the art-as-object versus art-as-image discourse. Often presented in series, each individual composition becomes an integral component in the larger concept. As such, these works pose new questions around what it means to create and display a visual concept. AESTHETIC The visual presentation of Evans concepts oscillates from the bright, utopian forms of geometric abstraction to the meta-modern, reconfigured and hypermodified forms of our post millennial culture. MEDIA Evan works with a variety of broadly accessible design software, appropriating and repurposing commercial tools as creative media. In doing so, his compositions point to the literal and conceptual boundaries of "new" media, as well as its inherent possibilities. STATEMENT My body of work to date invites a review, reinterpretation, and re-questioning of the axioms of visual abstraction through the most important social lens of the twenty-first century - the computer monitor. 'The artist's aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give him information... . The artist would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.' (Sol Lewitt.)