Tangled up in blue

WHAT IT IS: Fade Into Blue is an enigmatic, evocative oil-on-canvas painting by Laura Lewis, a queer visual artist originally from Halifax and now based in Winnipeg. This large-scale work (183-by-152 cm) is currently on view at Plug In ICA as part of Lewis’s solo exhibition One eye filled with night.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: This is a show of paintings, often really gorgeous paintings, but Lewis is also using the medium in a conceptual way. Taken together, these pieces are in a tricky critical conversation with the long history of figurative painting. They explore the expressive and esthetic possibilities of the medium, while taking on subjects that have often been sidelined or oversimplified.

The people in these paintings aren’t passive objects but active collaborators. Lewis works with the sitters, who are friends, sometimes fellow artists and members of the LGBTTQ+ community, in long preparatory photo shoots. She shows them in their own private spaces, in poses and postures that simultaneously reveal and conceal. These are not definitive portraits but open-ended explorations, diving into questions about the construction of identity, especially queer identity.

Some of the works in the show make sideways references to historical artists such as Edouard Manet and Marcel Duchamp, but Lewis is also using painting to reference photography and film. Those three mediums have been in an “it’s complicated” relationship since the 19th century, and Lewis continues that productive tension. In style, her works are painterly, with brushy texture and sudden shards of colour. In terms of content, they often call up images associated with vintage film stills.