Old Orchard | Miranda Crabtree

About

Old Orchard is a grove of silken air-brushed paintings. Women are laid into the grain of the landscape; participating in activities of collecting, archiving, protecting, playing, or the keeping of their ambiguously vegetal props. Crabtree imagines the aged and seemingly barren orchard as an idyllic past-space for fantasy and desire to flourish. The exhibition is an invitation to wander through a once verdant woodland and witness its transformation into a site for the activities and labors of women. Playful figures frozen in their act, embody a physical autonomy and momentary pleasure that melts into the tangled spiritual domain of the pastoral.

Deriving subject matter from dreams and daily interactions with natural spaces, Miranda Crabtree creates Interdisciplinary imagery as a panacea to these sorted impressions. The figures in her work eerily melt into and enter the spiritual domain of landscape.

Her work echoes a two-fold and deeply felt concern for her surroundings that connects current ecological dissonance with the restricted ability of women to move safely through urban wooded spaces. Crabtree confronts these themes with an antidote in her work: carefully chosen color palettes and figural positions that exude a steady glow of optimism, while a sinister edge graces the narrative’s penumbra.

The artist would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.