SHIN HAUS is proud to showcase paintings by Katrina Jurjans and Matilda Forsberg. Both Jurjans and Forsberg’s paintings play with the (re)construction of memory, deftly rendering the process of recollection with highly developed visual languages. Jurjans uses pattern, color, repetition, and layering to construct nuanced narratives around female bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Jurjans’s painting constructs a female gaze focused on transition and elision: “narratives heavy with symbolism, where flowers embody feelings of absence and growth and rain clouds communicate emotion.” Forsberg also communicates emotion through her technique as well as her subjects. Her experiments with texture add a synesthetic quality to her work which evokes the passage of time in which she lets intuition guide her practice– she does not paint toward a preconceived end, but lets the means of reifying emotion and memory become an all-encompassing process-cum-product. Both Jurjans’s and Forsberg’s paintings have pasts and futures that change to contextualize the viewer’s present.

Nothing is exactly what it seems in either of these painter’s works, which gives them a rare feeling of activity, a spell-binding experience of simultaneous reverie and foreshadowing. In Jurjans’s work, a stippled blue field can shift beneath the viewer’s eyes from a pool to tears, the established pattern transmuting and underscoring the emotional tenor of her paintings. Jurjans is conscious of the canonical male gaze and works to subvert it, by painting women as “fully immersed in both their physical and emotional environments” as opposed to “contained and separate from their surroundings.” Forsberg’s work focuses on family and emigration, depicting familiar photographic compositions with thrilling painterly touches. Forsberg’s construction of memory is textured and emotional, refusing to be pinned down as her scenes construct and cannibalize themselves. By articulating sublime colors and eliding textures, Forsberg’s paintings demonstrate how tenuous and sensual our grasp on memory can be. Jurjans and Forsberg approach the remembrance of embodied experience in different ways, but each advance our perception of the lives we’ve lived, are living, and have yet to live.

Katrina Jurjans graduated from Concordia University with a BFA in Art History and Studio Art in 2014. Jurjans’ most recent solo exhibition, “momentarily I take the shape of a flower,” was at Coldstream Fine Art Gallery in Toronto, featuring both painting and installation pieces. In 2020, Jurjans was named one of Saatchi Art’s Rising Stars. She has participated in arts residencies in Copenhagen, Mexico, and Canada.

Matilda Forsberg graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. In 2020, her work was presented in Mother Tongue as part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. She is the awardee of the 2021 Liquitex Residency and the recipient of the 2021 City of Newark and Newark Arts Creative Catalyst Fund Fellowship, and the 2020 Newark Art Accelerator grant by Project for Empty Space and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.