John Abrams

Born: Montreal, Quebec. 1959
Lives/Works: Toronto, Canada

Film is the dominant visual media of our time, controlling how we view the world and how we interact within it and painting is the place where I translate my experience of moving, talking images into painted pictures and words. The act of exploring new media through old media unlocks a form of slippage by exposing two different ways of depicting and seeing the plastic capabilities of painting and film.
My process of selecting and capturing sequential scenes from films is both intuitive and formal; intuitive because I am responding to narratives and images that are affective and aesthetic, formal because the painting-combine installations are organized within content, format and narrative presentation systems. My project engages the language of painting as a way of interpreting the language of film, not dissimilar to the way a book is made into a film or a script is turned into living theatre. Each translation is open to reinterpretation through different productions over time.

MFA York University.
My paintings can be found in the collections of: the National Gallery of Canada; the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph University; the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University; the University of Toronto Art Centre; the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery; the Art Gallery of Windsor; the OHare Airport; and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the McMaster Museum of Art.
,