Artist Statement  -  discoveries Montreal

Denise’s work reflects her love of photography, painting and travel configured into graphic pseudo-realities of everyday life filtered through her own whimsical creative lens. Her tableaux are bustling, surreal pastiches of -architectural elements and city life, arranged at unusual angles, irregular scale and not necessarily in their true-to-life configuration.

Her creative process involves digital photo manipulation, image transfer, acrylic photomontages, acrylic paints/-mediums, and other innovative techniques.  Working in a variety of scale, Denise creates panels that are graphic, contemporary and yet somehow nostalgic.  Often her pieces are black and white with minimalist colour accents, while others abound with colour - her visual vocabulary always unique and always authentic.

In her most recent series – Discoveries: Montreal - Denise explores each of the island city’s 34 boroughs.  Venturing out (camera in hand) she has captured the iconic and quirky details that make every borough unique, turning each into a one-of-a-kind mixed media panel.  The series offers a rare insight into the distinct flavours of all the ‘little villages’ that make up the island’s rich landscape.

Merging many photographs into a singular image, Denise’s unique impressions of the city capture the urban landscape through the eyes of a new resident, highlighting the often mundane, yet essential elements that make up the living, breathing and evolving ecosystem of the city she’s called home since 2009.