By Andrew Wright

The most dramatic change marking Melissa Doherty's new work is a radical shift in scale. For the past 10 years Doherty has been quietly building a significant body of work of small and intensely detailed paintings: renderings that astound by sheer virtuosity. Her exhibition titled simply 'Outdoorsy', signals perceptual and physical shifts outwards and upwards to large-scale paintings that address landscape, desire, identity, loss, and scale itself.

Doherty's subjects have remained the same: landscapes, the suburbs, the natural settings that surround them, humanity's interventions onto and into the land. Her works are singularly focussed in terms of both their subject matter and their technique. Doherty, who works from photographs, pilfers and combines imagery to create views that sit on the edge of possibility.

'Outdoorsy' is comprised of a number of large oil paintings that depict strange and unreal views of the land. A copse of trees made up of bulbous forms is bathed in an improbable light, an aerial view of a forest appears that is partially clear cut, and a mountain rises from below as if covered by an even fabric of vegetation.

In fact, these vast spaces begin as miniatures, as constructed portions of dioramas. Here, Doherty has photographed folds in polar fleece blankets and fleece clothing cut-outs shaped into trees. And it is these photographs that form the basis of the large work. They reveal that the paintings are entirely imaginary: images of playful miniatures, two times removed from what they seek to represent. In some ways, Doherty is as much a photographer as she is a painter. Her visual language mixes vocabulary from both camps: 'soft-focus' and 'wet-in-wet'; 'depth-of-field' and 'aerial perspective'; 'studio lighting' and a kind of subtle 'chiaroscuro.' She continually shifts the angle of view to explore and confound the eye's relationship to the world around us.

There is also a subtle eroticism to these fuzzy nodules that make up her world. These shaved, gathered, and re-configured blankets mask both feminine and masculine forms. One can imagine or remember wearing polar fleece, and the kind of warmth and comfort it can provide. One step further and we are imagining our own body's form under and within the soft ground cover of the paintings. Doherty's expert and loving manipulation of the paint itself is an exercise in restraint.

Scale is a central issue. Doherty troubles our relationship to these works. These are big pictures of small things and these small things represent big places. In looking, we are aware of both the vastness of the representation and the intimacy of the source material. It is intimate immensity, to borrow a phrase from Gaston Bachelard ¹. These paintings are half way between representation and still being the thing that they are.

There is, of course, an environmental reading here: one that is critical of human practices in relation to the natural environments that we inhabit or explore. After all, Doherty has created a surrogate and acceptable nature formed entirely from polyester. This is but one aspect of the work, and her treatment of the subject is more complex and conflicted. Doherty presents scenes of destruction and order, of the re-organization of the natural, and shows us THEIR bittersweet beauty.  What could be interpreted as stylistic flourish or mannered execution applied to hopeful and naïve views of nature, are in fact almost sinister photo-real renderings of the organic supplanted by the mechanical. 

Melissa Doherty is a Kitchener based artist. She is represented by Red Head Gallery in Toronto and Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto and Vancouver. For more information visit her web site at www.melissadoherty.com.

1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press: Boston, Mass. 1994. p.183.