Newzones is pleased to present "Emily Filler: Deconstructed Bouquets", a solo exhibition and new body of work by the Canadian contemporary artist.

As with all her work, Emily Filler brings mixed media elements together to communicate a sense of joy – weaving painting, printmaking and photography together in her ‘painterly collages’. Flowers act as a departure point to a world that dissolves into abstraction, whereby creating a sense of the familiar, but also the feeling that one is falling into a dream. Filler’s artwork walks the line between the real and imaginary, not wishing to present the viewer with a realistic interpretation of flowers and bouquets, but rather to convey the beauty and the impressions which they leave behind in our memories.

For "Deconstructed Bouquets", Filler initially approached the new body of work thinking about how she could simplify. Of the exhibition she states:

"I have always admired artists with a minimalist aesthetic – Ellsworth Kelly, Etal Adnan, Barnett Newman, late Matisse. I think in some ways as an artist it’s very hard to escape yourself, your style, and so even though I love work like this I’ve made very little of it myself.

Before I started working on the show I was going on lots of long walks. I spent a lot of time walking around residential neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto. I started noticing all these brightly coloured accents everywhere. Houses, roads, cars, and even grass are usually fairly neutral colours, but then I would see a yellow watering can, a bright orange pylon, a blue tricycle on a lawn that would stand out in the neutral landscape.

It made me think about how you could collage bright, flat shapes into a neutral background and what an interesting effect that would have. The earlier pieces in this series have mostly grey backgrounds for this reason. Then I started looking at the work of Sterling Ruby. If I got stuck on a painting in the studio I would grab this book of his work that I have and say to myself out loud ‘What would Sterling Ruby do?’ This is when I got hooked on circles. Sterling Ruby did lots of collages with circles. It is strangely a shape I’ve never considered, but I really began to love.

As I was doing all of this I was also thinking about the nature of collage and how in addition to collaging together physical pieces of canvas or paper you could also in a more abstract way collage together ideas. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me before. I save a lot of images on my phone. I have over 25000 images saved of random things like book covers, interiors, art, fashion shows, so many things. I started piecing together random ideas I’ve had for a long time. So for example one piece might have a reference to another artist I admire, a Prada runway show from 2009 and a garden hose I saw on someone’s lawn.

Then I started thinking about how each painting is a kind of visual diary of the things I saw around that time, things I noticed and admired. It made me wonder if a painting would be the same if I had worked on it on a different day at a different time. Or could this exact thing only be made at this exact time with these outside factors – Who did I talk to that day? Was I in a good mood? What did I see when I was looking around?

I suppose I’ll never know. What I do know is that working this way was very freeing and exciting. I think when you are a visual artist and you are recognized for certain bodies of work you have made in the past you don’t realize how much that dictates the work you make. When I tried to remove all of that (which you can’t ever entirely do, but still) it allowed anything and everything to be an option which made these works an exciting adventure for me.

What I hope to convey with these pieces is a sense of joy, freedom, a bit more simplicity, and express to the viewer (even if a little mysteriously) who I am and what excites me in this moment in time."

Emily Filler received her BFA Honours from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her work has been exhibited across North America and can be found in private and corporate collections world-wide.