Canadian painter, Nancy Friedland (Toronto, ON), paints the fleeting, ordinary moments that seed a lifetime of nostalgia. Some of her most poignant work on view tenderly captures the overwhelming magnetism of young love. Figures press so tightly against one another that faces melt and merge in a fleshy mess of brushstrokes. Tentative thresholds–between bodies, persons, childhood and adulthood–are crossed. 

Highway of Diamonds yearns for eternal summer nights set to the tune of a fuzzy radio. Friedland’s romantics are almost entirely nocturnal, illuminated only by brief bursts of light: fireworks and fireflies, birthday-cake candles, tips of cigarettes. Some figures are alone, adrift on a mattress or in the tub, too young and naive to break curfew. In another instance, an older couple stands on a porch, waiting and watching. Long ago, too, they probably dissolved into each other.

Nancy Friedland is an artist investigating narrative, landscape, and darkness in her work. After studying photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design she completed her MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Sir Edmund Walker Scholar. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and has exhibited across Canada and internationally. Lately, Nancy has begun to push beyond the photographic reference, exploring the reaches of her imagination through magic realism. 

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