Tanya Morand’s visual art production encompasses silk-screen printing as featured here, as well as drawing and painting. Creating compositions of twirling spaces that she calls “Spin-Plazas”, her imagery is inspired by her collages. Working with a vast repertoire of her photographs, the artist cuts, combines and redraws places, architecture, landscapes and figures. Transforming images through a process that spans photography, collage, drawing, silkscreen and painting, the artist delights in the poetry and significance found in translation and metamorphosis through these various techniques.
Influenced by Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting,” Tanya Morand fragments some forms into geometric shapes, while other elements she creates by cutting images of cities and parks into organic contours that evoke petals and leaves, in the style of Henri Matisse, who translated his love of nature into colourful silhouettes. As a tribute to Matta-Clark and Matisse, the artist imagines playful scenes as a resistance to the multiple urban problems that are currently a cause of concern worldwide: poor urban planning, the dilapidation, the abandonment and the demolition of old buildings; and the challenges of automobile-dominated metropolises. Pedestrians, skateboarders, cyclists and circus acrobats move through these impossible perspectives, sometimes defying the laws of gravity.
Like Matta-Clark, the artist considers the development of cities towards safer and healthier environments as a global process that can be achieved through urban planning, architecture and the visual arts. It is necessary to imagine a new space; that invites us to rethink the familiar and everyday.
Tanya Morand’s works have been exhibited in Canada, as well as in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Finland. Her paintings have been presented at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bay Saint Paul, Canada. Her work is included in the CPOA collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, the National Library and Archives of Quebec, the Inno-Centre Collection in Montreal and the Art Bank of the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as numerous private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. Her most recent solo exhibition of silkscreen prints was featured at Brita Prinz Arte in Madrid this year. In 2025 the artist will present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Sherbrooke, Canada.