Written by GAC Staff
Over-Saturated by emerging artist and community facilitator, Paige Bromby, explores her relationship with land in the digital age. Bromby works primarily in painting and drawing, often beginning her paintings from landscape photographs captured on her iPhone. Bromby navigates between digital screens and paint, constructing complex compositional layers, and extracting shapes from her photographs while incorporating deliberate distortions through digital filtering and repetitive editing. This practice creates abstracted and manipulated landscapes that no longer resemble their original state when photographed.
Her use of colour seems especially important as well. Several paintings feature overly saturated green foliage and flat black shadowed areas. Bromby emphasizes how using black paint directly from the tube mimics the highly contrasted images on digital screens. This is visualized well in A Sad Start where the black areas contrast with the overly bright colours of foliage, teetering between natural and artificial. Similarly, in Leave the Light On, the majority of the panel is painted black, effectively flattening the image with a few green strokes that indicate some semblance of a landscape.
Shape is also a prominent element of the work. Layers of distorted shapes are built upon each other, creating density akin to natural landscapes. In contrast, the use of black flattens the image at the same time. It depicts an optical illusion of sorts, seeing the depth of a landscape through the flatness of a photo. You’d Feel Her features this illusion, where at first glance, the viewer sees a thicket of leaves and twigs. However, with a second glance, the painting is uncovered to be almost entirely created of distorted shapes layered among one another. If isolated, these shapes would barely resemble the foliage that they so clearly visualize together. The painting reveals the artist’s interactions with the landscape through deconstruction, manipulation, and layering.
In our era of constant smartphone attachment and curated images that present idealized versions of our lives, Bromby’s work offers a refreshing perspective. These manipulated landscapes do not aim for perfection rather they promote contemplation and interaction with our surroundings. Bromby’s work depicts an interplay between digital illusion and physical reality, transgressing time and space.
Over-Saturated is on display at the Wyndham Arts Third Floor Gallery until April 19th. Visit Monday to Friday from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, and Saturdays from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
You can also meet the artist, Paige Bromby, at the reception on March 29th from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM at Wyndham Arts Third Floor Gallery, 125 Wyndham St N. Please note that this is not an accessible space. You can view the exhibition online here. Visit Bromby’s Instagram here and website here.
