en-ca SC0354-WCA-PA-1

en-ca Newnham - Building A - Level 2 - Student Commons

en-ca Carol Wainio (b. 1955)

en-ca Puss and Boots Copies

en-ca 2009

en-ca Painting

en-ca Acrylic on canvas

en-ca 91.4 x 121 cm

en-ca “Wainio first began exploring the book as a theme in an acclaimed body of work known as Book of Hours, which focused on anonymous medieval manuscript illuminations. Since then, her interest in the history of illustration, and particularly 19th-century social caricature and Renaissance children’s stories and fairy tales, has developed into a complex consideration of the relationship between symbolic and other forms of capital, as well as the means by which social and aesthetic hierarchies are conveyed and reproduced through images. Recent work in this vein includes 2009’s Puss in Boots Copies and 2008’s Jack and the Cornstalk, which use traditional European folktales as a points of departure for a critique of contemporary injustices linked to globalization, such as the devastating social and environmental effects of genetically modified “killer seeds” and corn-derived ethanol fuel.

Historically, myths and legends like Puss in Boots and Jack and the Beanstalk have functioned as cautionary tales whose morals warned against greed, duplicity and the misrepresentation of social status. Wainio’s work taps into this history, but in the service of social and aesthetic critique rather than morality. Her canvases are indeed like fairy-tale landscapes littered with the detritus of contemporary consumerism, but they are also an amalgam of modernist abstraction and the applied arts. As such her paintings question a range of stubborn class distinctions and cultural assumptions, including aesthetic hierarchies that continue to privilege painting over illustration; the paradox of value conferred by scarcity in a culture of mass production; and the conflation of democratic freedom with free-market enterprise.” (Emily Favley)

en-ca Canadian Art

en-ca Gift of Carol Wainio

en-ca No signature

Seneca Art