Towards is pleased to present Local Cherries Sweet Corn, a solo exhibition by Les Ramsay.
Taking its title from seasonal roadside signage found near the artists’ home in southern British Columbia, the exhibition weaves together Ramsay’s longstanding interest in vernacular imagery, the historical and formal language of painting, and our relationship to the natural world.
In this most recent body of work, Ramsay directs our attention to the local landscape. Focusing on roadside fruit stands, provincial parks, and wildlife native to the BC coast, he grounds his work in a sense of place, while at the same time creating complex, often fantastical compositions where seemingly disparate elements co-exists on a flattened singular plane.
Playing with surface, colour, and form, he imbues the paintings with an almost frenetic energy, employing brush strokes and mark making that oscillate back and forth between the digital and physical sphere.
Tofino J56, Desolation Sound Effects, (named after a baby orca first spotted off the coast of Vancouver Island in 2019) features a seemingly hastily rendered whale jumping high above a fictional landscape. Night Fever, The Asylum at Dusk, is a dark blue cross-section painting of ocean featuring a ‘fever’ of stingrays and skates below a loon.
Other works include chickens, clocks, fruits, flowers, and numbers combined in ways that often drift into the psychedelic and surreal.
Fundamental to Ramsay’s practice is an interest in the ways in which images are constructed and disseminated, and how that in turn shapes our experience of the world. Combining elements from his external surroundings with a rich, internal dialogue, he creates elaborate compositions that exist as sort of hybrid realities – piecing together disparate puzzles of this contemporary moment, in search for pathways to move forward.
