Corinne Duchesne's Explores What's Left Behind

Toronto artist, Corinne Duchesne, accomplished her goal of making a painting a day during her fortnight at VCCA and celebrated with an open studio before packing them all up. Using acrylic and ink, Duchesne explores loss through the drawers of stuff left behind when someone dies. As she points out, in one way this stuff is unimportant, its destiny the dustbin. In another, it’s poignantly valuable because it’s what the person touched all the time.

Duchesne’s veils of discordant hues and assertive jagged lines only hint at the drawer’s contents. It's not what she's after; she's got bigger fish to fry, namely the intangible evocation of the person who's gone. 

Most of Duchesne’s paintings fill up the drawer-sized sheet of paper. Some are collages contained within the rectangle, while others cascade down the wall as if the drawers had been tipped up spilling everything out.

Here and there among the works one notices recognizable items, roses and also rats that are mostly only suggested. Though their meaning is nebulous, the rats rattle one’s chain and so offer an interesting edge to the work. Duchesne says the first painting she did when she arrived was a particularly vicious looking rat she placed in the corner down near the floor of her studio and the rest of the work flowed from that.