Artist talk with Carol Wainio

27.07.2010

In her paintings the Canadian artist Carol Wainio makes use of early children’s book illustrations. “Picture books” in her work, and their sometimes full, sometimes empty illustration pages, frame questions about original and copy, scarcity and excess, modern and pre-modern. The illustrated book recurs as window or empty frame, stage set or diptych, embodying a kind of wondering about representation, epistemology, and about the fate of early skeletal stories of exchange, transformation or wish, which like myth or folk tale, had been filled in by individual telling or dressed up by different illustrators over time.

During her stay at the Deutsche Börse Residency Program Wainio did research on the children’s book collection of Walter Benjamin at Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University Frankfurt. Benjamin’s texts “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) and “Some motifs in Baudelaire” (1939) have had a strong influence on Wainio’s paintings.

Carol Wainio made her M.F.A. at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec (CA) in 1985. Since 2003 she works as a professor at the Department of Visual Arts at University of Ottowa. She participated in several exhibitions in Canada, the Netherlands and the USA, e.g. at Galerie René Blouin, Montréal, at S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto and at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto.