Headline Gallery is pleased to present work by Vancouver-based artists Gillian Haigh and Steph Varasteh on its online viewing room platform.
Haigh explores our understanding and perception of images. Interested in the “readability” of images and texts and the intersection of these semiotic systems, the artist creates oil on canvas works. Haigh believes that painting is a language with many co-existing dualities; a painting functions as an image and as an object, its surface is historical and modern and grounded in conceptual and material conversations. Throughout the artist’s practice and continued research Haigh finds moments to reflect upon when these opposing aspects collide.
In Stephanie Nelia Varasteh’s new body of work, SOMA, the artist captures moments of pure authenticity. Varasteh explores how we relate to the soma, body, and the pathways in which we interact with the natural elements that surround us. Varasteh’s images explore the internal landscapes that give us individuality, highlighting how movement can grant us agency over our emotions and actions. Themes of love, grief, anger, and betrayal manifest within the photographer’s images as she illuminates the intimate felt spaces between skin, bone, and the body’s soft tissues, transporting audiences into a reflective and vulnerable state of humanness.
