Sylvia Trotter Ewens: Taming Grief: The Banana Trees Stand Vigil in Your Resting Place

The Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery is proud to offer it’s first ever summer artist residency to alumna Sylvia Trotter Ewens (Fine Arts, 2014).  Sylvia will utilize the time and space to advance paintings and work on projections in completion of her MFA (Painting) at Concordia University.

She writes, ‘This is a body of work pulling from writings I’ve made on my time caregiving and experiencing loss after my mother’s passing. In these writings I used the garden as an allegory for these experiences as I tackled the memories of this time through writing and painting as a means to congeal its memory.  The exhibition will be made up of moving collages of videos I’ve collected  throughout the seasons at Montreal’s botanical gardens.  I am also completing paintings following the same aesthetic heterogeneity based upon a collection of images from the botanical gardens in Honduras and Laval.

I visually portray my mental space as a garden in transition in  a condition of disrepair, dulled or frosted, but it is also a psychological space—a place where my mother and I meet, revisiting memory and rebuilding/repurposing what was lost.

Sylvia Trotter Ewens is a Honduran-Canadian painter based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. After her DEC in Fine Arts at Dawson,  she completed a BFA in Fine Arts: Majoring in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University (2018).   She is a recipient of the Shirley Reed Graduate Scholarship and Lillian Vineberg Graduate Award.  Her work has been exhibited in group and solo shows at the SMCQ’s Série Hommage exhibition, Galerie Art Mûr,  Jano Lapin Gallery, Espace Sensible, the Maison de la Culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Monkland, AVE Gallery, and ARTCH.

 

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Sylvia Trotter Ewens