Published on 02 May 2012

By James

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Jill Price has awesome work. It reminded me a lot of Robert Rauschenberg. Here's what she had to say: "A contemporary landscape artist, my work is constantly evolving to explore or capture global issues that affect our culture. Striving to use materials that help to evoke the issues embedded within my subject matter, my work combines painting, text, stitching, and digital imagery to visually investigate how our landscapes are changing.

My most recent work, 'Fabricated Landscapes' is an extension of my exhibition “Rural Transitions", recently held at The Art Exchange in London, Ontario. That exhibition was an examination of our rapidly changing relationship to rural landscapes: how we look at, acquire, work and harvest them. This new series is partly in response to my new hometown of Barrie adjusting it's southern boundary to include 2,293 hectares of rural land currently in the Town of Innisfil, as well as my observation of undeveloped pockets of land nestled within our city limits that point to our rural beginnings. Currently living two streets away from farmland, I find myself on the edge of suburban sprawl, something I have coined “RURBIA”, an apt vantage point given my current thematic and aesthetic explorations. In these works I visually investigate how our culture simultaneously mimics and destroys nature through its industrious design and development. By juxtaposing structures and patterns of urban development against the organic boundaries and landforms of the countryside, draws attention to the farmland needed to sustain us that becomes more and more compromised. The patchwork into the canvases is intended to communicate a hope for mending our landscapes, while the thick palette knife strokes of plastic paint beside the squares of recycled fabric, reveal the dense carbon footprint left behind by the highly consumerist machine of our society. The final layer of block printing creates a nostalgia for the natural habitat and wildlife that once inhabited these spaces, which are now often thought of as pests."

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