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Shawn Serfas, B.F.A., B.A., M.F.A.
Lecturer, Department of Creative Studies
Office: FIN 162 |
ARTIST STATEMENT
The foundation of my art practice and creative research explores the relationships between Environmental Sciences, the landscape and issues bordering abstraction and representation. Within that framework I pose questions concerning identity, place, ancestral origin, religion and relational abstraction. The environment offers a foundation for inquiry into the humanity’s struggle with itself, our sites of experiences and our purpose. The compositional similarities I find in the physical and human landscape fuels my dissection and abstraction of information for purposes of understanding the creative act.
Excerpt – Lubos Culen, Introduction and Interview in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial, (Catalogue), Vernon Public Art Gallery, March 2008, pp. 4-5 and 14-24
Serfas identifies himself primarily as a ‘landscape painter’ influenced by the concept of ‘relational abstraction’ often referred to as ‘associative abstraction’. This approach to art-making is concerned with the extraction of the experiential nature of both material and subliminal environments. Here, an interesting dichotomy arises: the modality of the concept based on the associative ‘understanding’ of abstract pictorial propositions allows the viewers to find the references to some sort of physical environment created through a process of erosion, sedimentation, and entropy observed from a bird’s-eye-view. This fact extends the ‘reading’ of abstract images past their abstract or nonobjective representational forms. It introduces a possibility of their interpretation linked to the artwork’s associative qualities through which we as viewers interpret it. This interpretation is parallel to the viewer’s actual experiences of the physical environment.In the process of constructing images, Serfas links himself with contemporary artists whose work is preoccupied with physical environments on both micro and macro levels. His mode of operation relies on a repeated application of the painting media that results in a substantial physical build-up which reflects an easily imagined material environment. From this point of view, Serfas’ images quite successfully express his desire to capture the essence of his preoccupation with the environment.
Excerpt – Carolyn MacHardy. “Liminal Spaces” in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial (Catalogue), Vernon Public Art Gallery, March 2008, pp. 6-11
Over the past eight years, Serfas has developed a body of work that circles around issues of our relationship with the land and how we mark it and map it. It’s an interest with a strong autobiographical slant: Serfas grew up in the small city of Prince Albert, his family having come to Saskatchewan from Germany and Ukraine in the early 1900s as homesteaders. The idea of a raw and gritty land transformed first by surveying and then by the addition of buildings and crops is embedded in Serfas’s family narrative and provides a founding matrix for both his paintings and his interest in environmental sciences. In the same way, being from northern Saskatchewan has been extremely important to the genesis of Serfas’s interests: Prince Albert, poised on the boreal plains between the arboreal forests to the north and agricultural lands to the south, is a gateway to Prince Albert National Park (famous in part as the place where Grey Owl invented himself) and then north of that to the Churchill River system, while fifty miles to the east of the city, the two Saskatchewan Rivers, the North and the South, meet in an area called The Forks. Until he moved to Edmonton to pursue an MFA at the University of Alberta, this is the terrain that provided Serfas’s spatial markers, a provisional answer to the question “Where am I”?Serfas’s paintings are exuberant and richly textured. He refers to himself as a landscape painter, but his paintings do not offer mimetic descriptions of the view in front of his eye; instead they probe the idea that science, rather than revealing the processes at work both within the earth and on its surface, only makes us more aware that things are happening that are not obvious to the human eye: the processes behind plate tectonics, global warming and melting ice caps, for example, are invisible to all but the most sophisticated technology. And our understanding of nature has been radically challenged over the past century: as writer Johanne Sloane notes, “…nature really is different than it was one hundred years ago… now we know that nature is likely to be altered, toxified or mutated, whether the ecosystem in question is a genetic sequence in the human body or an isolated mountain lake.”
Last reviewed 
6/3/2011 9:41:07 AM
Crown, Revolution Series
2009
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
77 1/4 " x 77 1/4 "
Nimbus #2, Revolution Series
2009
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
77 1/4 " x 77 1/4 "
Plaything, Aeolian Series
2009
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
60 " x 48 "
Cataract, Aeolian Series
2009
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
60 " x 48 "
Silo, Revolution Series
2009
Acrylic/Mixed Media on Canvas
20 ¼ " x 40 ¾ "
Bonbon, Field and Canal Series
2009
Acrylic/Mixed Media on Canvas
24 ¾ " x 37 "
Borderland - Eclipse, Revolution Series
2008
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
95 3/4 " x 143.5 "
Front, Revolution Series
2008
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
71 1/2 " x 83 1/2 "
Dark Black Cloud #2, Revolution Series
2008
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
83 1/2 " x 71 1/2 "
Radial Fault #2, Revolution Series
2007
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
48 " x 36 "
Post, Revolution Series
2007
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas,
83 1/2 " x 71 1/2 "
Chariot #4, Basin and Range Series
2006
Acrylic/ Mixed Media on Canvas
16 " x 24 "
