Randall Steeves

What should a painter do?
- By Deanne Achong

In his exhibition, “Proper Research”, at the Kwantlen Art Gallery, Randall Steeves responds to this question with a vigourous and critically engaged sensibility. “Altered Patterns”, for instance, featuring the burnt-off fingerprints of John Dillinger, is a wry nod towards conceptualist practice. Equally, the freshness of his work resides in the artist’s enthusiastic and unabashed embrace of the heydey of modern abstract painting. Randall Steeves has produced a series of paintings worth looking at.

Using a precise, methodical approach that encompasses the mixed technologies of digital art practice, academic research and a wide scope of influence—from film-maker Stan Brakhage to the poet Charles Olson—Randall explores the fascination of the ordinary, the boundary between the photographic index and the painterly trace, and their relationship to the imaginary. The work invites the viewer to reconsider the inherent character and strength of the gesture of painting itself. The medium, encaustic painting, is juicy and the canvases are not only painted but scratched, gouged and comprised of active marks. “Proper Research” definitely merits investigation.

Deanne Achong is an artist based in Vancouver. She has taught at the Emily Carr Institute and recently completed a residency at the Western Front, where she made a crowbot.