Window no. 5 Painting

Bio: 1978, Vancouver BC
Gwenessa Lam is a visual artist based in Vancouver. She received her BFA from the University of British Columbia and MFA from New York University. She has taught at NYU, ECIAD, UBC, and the Art Institute of Vancouver. Gwenessa has exhibited in Canada and the USA, including the Bronx Museum of Art and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. She was awarded a fellowship to attend a residency at Skowhegan, Maine, and MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

In my work, I explore the nature of perception, particularly the value of sight as the predominant sense through which one acquires information and understanding. I am interested in the viewers desire to see, and the expectations such a desire can bring to the experience of images. Traditionally, a picture represents a window or portal into another visual space; however, such a model can be subverted through distortions or voids that re-evaluate the manner in which we habitually view images.
In the series Windows, I explore the notion of absence through paintings of vacant windows and walls. The windowed wall is a liminal space between the interior and exterior. It suggests a potential to see, to visualize the other side without physically entering into the space beyond the glass pane. This tension between vision and knowledge, disclosure and concealment- is central to my work. Their opacity inverts the transparent, revelatory function of windows, operating more as empty screens and portals, a means of surveillance or escape. The setting of the interior situates notions of alienation and estrangement within the familiar and banal. Representations of the void, in the guise of the blank window or the shadowed wall, play upon the viewers desire to fill the void, whilst never completely satisfying it.