Dominique Fung & Georgina Lee Walker: Physic Garden

Exhibition Dates: July 28 – August 14, 2016 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 28th 6-9pm Location: Project Gallery Toronto: 1109 Queen St E

Physic Gardens: A historical type of herb garden devoted to the cultivation and display of medicinal healing plants.

The works of Dominique Fung and Georgina Lee Walker focus on presenting environments that deal with personal narratives and conflicts. Through painting, both artists find a sense of personal validation by creating safe spaces and environments that often take on a lush and dreamlike quality. In a time when talking about personal struggle is an almost faux pas, these artists use their artistic practice as an opportunity to gain insight and contribute to personal and collective discussions around racial identity, feminism, and disability.

Dominique Fung takes a critical view on the cultural diaspora between seemingly separate identities. Having grown up in a first generation Chinese-Canadian household, she references her experience with whitewashing in her adolescence. Fung’s work deals with the cultural confusion of having to coincide and adopt the dominant culture and values. Her paintings combine disparate elements of Chinese kitsch/mythology with iconic imagery of 20th-century Canadian landscape paintings to create a dreamlike environment, which is a personal safe space. Fung’s tongue-in-cheek paintings intend to confront invisibility as a serious and complex topic.

Georgina Lee Walker's present body of work addresses and confronts her attempt to break through personal barriers in regards to femininity, disability, memories, and their resulting anxiety and insecurity. The use of literal and illusionistic barriers is a way to create a narrative and speak subtly about experiences from her own life. In Walker’s work, these barriers include fencing, glass blocks, or even fogged glass. The use of soft, saccharine or glazed color is a deliberate way to subvert these spaces and make them into nurturing environments, while the introduction of plants is intended as an allusion to growth.