BY ELISSA BARNARD
The Chronicle Herald
Published April 11, 2014
Monika Wright’s mixed-media abstracts at Swoon are fanciful but serious in their exploration of imaginary worlds of possibility and freedom.
She creates deep spaces with shapes and lines that can be seen as biomorphic, rock-like and celestial.
Bright Angel by Monika Wright in her solo show at Swoon Gallery. The viewer could be Peter Pan in Never Never Land or Hans Solo in a Star Wars spaceship in an asteroid belt. Wright suggests motion and music.
Perhaps because she is also a photographer, light is a life force in Wright’s work, in both her acrylics and her mixed-media paintings. These have gleaming surfaces out of acrylic, foil, ink and resin on canvas. The foil is craggy and fissured against Wright’s smooth and watery surfaces in blues or greens or hot yellows.
Wright’s titles indicate that her spaces are physical and spiritual. An acrylic on canvas in rose and orange with blue boulders, fissures and crevasses is titled Bright Angel: Deep into the Canyon. But there is still sunshine; light reaches even in the darkest places in our life.
The exhibit, Temptation to Fly, is inspired by the long-lost imaginary world of childhood.
Defying Gravity by Monika Wright on exhibit at Swoon in Hammonds Plains.“I ask you, for a moment, to spread your wings again, to have the courage to believe in the magic and mystery of childhood when you flew with faeries and super-heroes,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “We can create wonder and goodness by opening ourselves, by being aware — and by taking fearless action.”
“Temptation to Fly is an exhibition that asks you to defy the convention of caution and return to a time when fantasies felt real. Dreams do come true.”