Monica Tap

Tap teaches at the University of Guelph and holds an MFA from NSCAD. In the mid-90s she began projecting slides of old master drawings decomposed into coloured overlays and tracing them, in an attempt to frustrate her impulse to make compositional decisions. She is known for “landscape” paintings that hover between representation and non-representation. Her marks appear to float apart, as if an illusionistic landscape drawing were dissolving and reforming itself. “I was using the grammar of representation to create abstract paintings. In representing abstraction and abstracting representation, I find myself in-between.”

Her most recent paintings acknowledge that we are more likely to observe landscapes hurtling by the window of a vehicle. They are based on crude videos shot with her digital still camera while riding past the landscape, hence their evocation of threshold moments of perception–the split second between perception and recognition.

MSVU exhibitions