Pat Stanley uses two distinctly different perspectives to render aspects of her ongoing theme: the uneasy coexistence of the built environment with the natural world.
Her Intersection series presents familiar symbols of our urban culture - concrete structures in Toronto’s landscape – transformed by future environmental impact into images in an album of an extinct civilization. The perspective is close-up and intimate, the structures vulnerable and tenuous, yet the viewer senses the presence of archetypal, monumental icons of a modern civilization in decline.
Her most recent Crossroad series, begun in 2011, takes a giant step back – and up – from this intimate encounter, using vivid, aerial perspectives to further explore her ongoing theme. These high-altitude views of sprawling urbanscapes bring to mind Hubble telescope images of galaxies long-dead, but giving us the light – and life – of their past.
Pat Stanley is a pictorial historian of the inevitable dominance of environmental transformation over man-made permanence. The paintings at once celebrate this triumph and hold in awe and reverence the concrete monuments of contemporary urban civilization.
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