Joani Tremblay at Zalucky Contemporary / Toronto, Canada



Joani Tremblay
"The Space in Between"

9 June - 14 July, 2018

3044 Dundas St. W. 
Toronto, ON M6P 1Z3 


The Shape of a Walk, 2018, Oil on Belgian linen, 36 x 32 inches  



     A Room of One’s Own, 2018, Oil on Belgian linen, 36 x 32 inches 







  Installation view




    Installation view




     The Path Out of the Garden, 2018, Oil on Belgian linen, 36 x 32 inches 






    Paris, a Botanizing on the Asphalt, 2018, Oil on Belgian linen, 48 x 42 inches 





   Installation view





    The Path Out of the Garden, Oil on Belgian linen, 36 x 32 inches 





    Past the End of the Road 2, Oil on Belgian linen, 18 x 12 inches 





     Past the End of the Road 1, Oil on Belgian linen, 18 x 12 inches 





   Installation view




  Installation view




All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary. Photo credit: Toni Hafkenscheid



Death Valley
National Park
A grey sky in Paris
Majesty palms

John Constable's Cloud Study ca. 1822

What do these things have in common? They have all made appearances, like a cast of characters, in the paintings of Joani Tremblay. The Montreal-based artist culls images from sources as varied as old master paintings, digital stock photos of southwest landscapes, and even personal photos to populate her hybrid landscapes.

Working first as a collage artist, Tremblay digitally crops, adjusts, and reassembles source imagery until, as she puts it, “I find this feeling of a place I was searching for”. Once a working blueprint or study is rendered, she turns to the canvas and relays through paint visions of landscapes that blur the boundary between reality and her own imagination. In “A Room of One’s Own”, a desert terrain leading up to a mountain range is truncated by a gathering of house plants in the foreground that appear oddly out-of-place. Slightly more bewildering is the arching rock formation, absent of texture its abstraction bears a likeness to the New Mexico work of Georgia O’Keefe.

The loose spatial logic in Tremblay’s work is like a collection of travel memories that have become intertwined over time - we can retrace their contours with our mind, but never with our footsteps.


Joani Tremblay is a Montreal-based artist who received an MFA from Concordia University (2017) and was the recipient of the Vladimir J. Elgart Graduate Scholarship and the Quebec Master Research Fellowship (FRQSC). Tremblay’s work has been shown in Los Angeles (Kantor LA), New York City (NADA NY), Stockholm (Pony Sugar), Romania (Bucharest Art Week), Mexico City (Material Art Fair), Tokyo (3331 Arts Chiyoda), Montreal (Parisian Laundry) and Edmonton (Latitude 53). In 2017 she was a finalist for the RBC Painting Competition, which included a group presentation at the National Gallery of Canada. She has participated in residencies in Los Angeles, Berlin and Tokyo, and has an upcoming residency at The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation in New York in January 2019. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, the most recent of which comes from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2018). She operates the artist project space Projet Pangée with Julie Côté in Montreal.


Her work will appear in the group exhibition Real Shapes curated by Aaron Mulligan at Dateline Gallery in Denver from June 15 - July 22, 2018.