The Great Wide Open | Liv Valmestad

Public Hours: August 11 – August 23, Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm.

Meet the Artist: Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm, Aug 13.

125 Adelaide Street, 2nd floor, Winnipeg

204-944-0809 or jordan@cre8ery.com

Masks are Mandatory @cre8ery due to high-risk individuals. Thank you for your understanding & respect.

Liv Valmestad is a Norwegian-Canadian artist based in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). She holds a B.F.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and graduate degrees from Queen’s and Western Universities, and a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Ringebu College, Norway. Her most recent artist residency was in Iceland in 2019. Valmestad has exhibited in several countries, including Italy, United States and Canada, and has work in public collections such as the University of Saskatchewan, University of Manitoba, the Millennium Library, the Buhler Collection, the Province of Manitoba Art Bank and the Imago Mundi Luciano Benetton Collection, Venice.

The Great Wide Open…….
From Norway to Iceland to the Canadian Prairies, these landscapes function as vehicles for exploring place, the effects of light, Stemning [mood], the examination of ambiguous and abstract space and my concern with the Sublime as an affective category.

Experiencing place is the catalyst for my work. Drawn to open vistas and expanses, I investigate light, space and my relationship to my immediate surroundings. My emotional attachment to place is materialized in paintings of spatial tension, galvanized in line, colour and pattern, where the natural environment provides an aesthetic outcome or mood and the emotional experience becomes the subject. By invoking conventions of the Sublime, Nature is framed as having qualities that inspire a sense of awe and illicit an intense response from the viewer, who is dwarfed in relation to its vastness, scale and expanse. This is represented by my treatment of the ocean and sky, and later the Prairie landscape, where the focus on expanse and scale is further accentuated by the strategic and understated insertion of objects.