Ian Monroe

Canyon Recreated is a sculptor’s version of landscape painting; an imaginary place where the architecture of the space is literally amplified through the mountains of speakers. Monroe takes the virtue out of painting, replacing paint with collaged materials ranging from paper, vinyl, carpet, and linoleum. Through this construction process Monroe lends a sense of solidity to his image, literally building a space which isn’t there. It’s a way of cheating at image-making: readymade colour fields fill in his hand-drawn pattern, creating a painting without rendering.

Monroe takes the virtue out of painting, replacing paint with collaged materials ranging from paper, vinyl, carpet, and linoleum. Through this construction process Monroe lends a sense of solidity to his image, literally building a space which isn’t there. It’s a way of cheating at image-making: readymade colour fields fill in his hand-drawn pattern, creating a painting without rendering.

In the work of Ian Monroe architectonic space is brought to the foreground, the surface of the work and the materials of its making are given prominence. The artist investigates the nature of idealised space: the showroom, the corporate office atrium, the church, and the hyper real environments of science fiction and computer games. All these spaces cater to, or project onto us, specific desires or lifestyles that maintain certain kinds of collective social myths.

The confrontational scale of Ian Monroe’s work bats the viewer back and forth between experiential space and the impenetrable surface, describing forms that lie parallel to the picture frame, and placing Monroe’s collages somewhere between painting and sculpture.