I’ve tried to be happy

Dawna Rose

Saskatoon-based artist Dawna Rose presents figurative and landscape paintings/drawings informed by mass media news, local and international politics, personality cults and representations of communities in transition. A virtual stream of public figures and urban-rural landscapes converge in her elaborate field of vision. Portraits of the troubled Canadian Federal Minister, Bev Oda vie for attention adjacent to a quirky portrait of the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, envisioned at a podium in a cavernous press gallery devoid of an audience. Other recurring figures are more generic, drawn from media sources.

Recognizable figures include rock throwers (protesters?), migrants or refugees carrying their worldly belongings, the bandaged or damaged man, distressed women, businessmen with pinched fingers seemingly drawing attention to unknown but essential measurements, documentary cameramen, a performance artist (!?) in a red sash costume, and isolated animals on a desolate foreground. All vie for our attention and attempt to haunt the viewer.

Rose’s oil paintings/drawings adopt an awkward children’s book form of realism that opens up an uncertain space to construct images. Layers of pastel colour are laid down so that Rose can scrape away at the frustration of progress in the 21st-century. Her general comment may direct us as viewers to the lost innocence of more than one generation of children and adults fed by a television and internet saturated world that bristles with the technology that shapes childhood memories and tastebuds.

Rose uses a consciously anachronistic style of painting/drawing to warn us about what might be. But our expectations are constantly derailed. Rose veers away from any narrative and sense of closure we might find in a children’s storybook. Elements of the past, present and future converge to form a sense of place devoid of narrative structure ---largely a place with no origin save her own subconscious.