Kristín Morthens & Scott Everingham: Axis // Öxull

 

Abstract painting is a collaboration. You have to collaborate with the world around you, translating the source material of life into compositions. Not the literal landscapes and figures, but the feelings, senses, auras, colours, and forms surrounding us. The painter becomes a conduit for these experiences, turning them into a universal language of paint. From there, abstract paintings invite the viewer in—asking them to consider what they see.

 

In "AXIS," the two-person exhibition of Scott Everingham and Kristin Morthens' abstract paintings, the language of abstraction is present in two distinct practices that respond and relate to each other. For both painters, their process is iterative. Each painting acknowledges the one that came before it. Additionally, each paint stroke is influenced by the one that came prior. In the lead-up to the exhibition, the two artists had ongoing conversations across Toronto, Canada and Reykjavik, Iceland, about their practices. Within these conversations, they noticed decisions and subconscious themes that linked both of their paintings.

 

For Everingham, painting is a way to create visual representations of conscious and subconscious environments. The spaces are both implausible—fictional spaces that defy logic and physics—and familiar shapes and colours derived from life. In the painting "Morning Hymns," multiple gradations are present, shifting from subtle pastel orange to blue, to the depths of deep burgundy and yellow, to literal paint strokes stacked on top of each other in a line. These technical choices create a harmony and tension that exists outside nature or the world as we know it.

 

Kristin Morthens's paintings combine landscape, figuration, and abstraction to create in-between spaces that defy easy categorization. In Morthens' painting, "A collective longing for an imaginary past," it appears that weather systems converge via a mix of hard, jagged lines and soft corners. Oscillating between thick brushstrokes and washes shifts the viewer’s perception of space and depth. In Morthens' paintings, we encounter a world more similar to our own, yet subtly altered. This realm, reminiscent of dreams, space, or underwater, follows distorted natural laws, such as skewed gravity.

 

The worldbuilding present in both Everingham and Morthens’s paintings comes together to create an alternate reality of abstraction. The paintings speak to each other like they came from a fictional or dreamlike place. To understand one, you must understand the other. To enter Morthens' skewed landscapes, it helps to understand Everingham's investigation into the subconscious. To understand the space and planes of Everingham, one can look at the atmospheric qualities of Morthens' work. The two painters speak to each other, in collaboration.