Marie Lannoo: Through and Through and Through

Virtual Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrdUHR3BQeQ Saskatoon artist Marie Lannoo is one of Canada’s best-known abstract painters. Over the past seven years she has developed a series of paintings that use transparent, reflective, acrylic mediums that allow her and her audiences to explore light and depth of field on the picture plane. Through this innovative technique, Lannoo’s paintings often “spill” an added dimension of colour beyond the frame onto to the wall or nearby environment. The stunning results of Lannoo’s endeavours led to her inclusion as the only female Saskatchewan artist in historian Roald Nasgaard’s influential book Abstract Painting in Canada. Nasgaard will also contribute an essay to the publication planned for this exhibition. Over the past two years, Lannoo has been experimenting with a new material that increases the dimensional capabilities of reflected colour. Working with beam line scientists and physicists at the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron in Saskatoon, a facility in which light reveals the subatomic particle structures of matter, she has created a new body of sculptures that diffract colours from incoming light sources. The resulting colour reflections form caustic or logarithmic spirals whose visual impact is mesmerizing. Through and Through and Through will present a number of these new sculptural works, as well as a new series of paintings that “turn colour on” sequentially, similar to the evolution of cells, through the artist’s painstaking layering of colour in specific patterns that, depending on the quality of light and the viewer’s position, cause different patterns and colours to appear. Marie Lannoo was born in Delhi, Ontario in 1954. She has an Honors Degree in French from the University of Saskatchewan and also enrolled in the MFA program there. She has further training at The Banff Centre and in Virton, Belgium. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. This exhibition is her first solo exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery and is curated by Dan Ring.