Pamela Masik

I combine mediums of painting, sculpture, video, sound, installation, performance, interpretive dance, conceptual art, in interactive enviroments.

Vancouver artist Pamela Masik creates art that is challenging yet hyper-sensitive - an uncommon paradox. In previous work, she sequestered herself in a sensory deprivation box for five days; meditated for extensive periods of time before unleasing her creative forces on canvas; and activated her whole body, covered in brushes, to create paintings. Like the mid-20th century American painter Mark Tobey, Masik attempts to clear away all rational and exterior practices in an effort to access a rich inner experience.
For the fourth in a series of shows for Fashion Rocks Vancouver, Masik performs a loosely choreographed two-hour action painting on an 8 x 20 foot canvas. To the accompaniment of music, she applies buckets of paint using a predetermined palette and brushes fashioned from brooms, mops, sponges and rakes. The performance, and the videotape accompanying the event, offers a rare glimpse of her studio techniques.

Masik's "events" have a romantic, inimitable quality of personal expression that is hard to categorize. She succeeds on several levels: for her intensity and directness, for her emotional orchestration, and for her lyrical pictorial vocabulary of colour and gesture. The American critic Clement Greenberg defended abstract painting on the grounds that "art succeeds in being good only when it incorporates the truth about feeling". In Masik's work, the feeling is as visible during the performance as it is in the completed pieces - resulting in an exceptional tour de force.

Mia Johnson
Vancouver, September 2004