* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Tristesse Seeliger is a Vancouver artist working in mixed media using painting, photocopy transfers, collage, and printmaking. For the past two years she has been working on a body of work focused on geometry, territories, perception and cartography. Using the principles in mathematics of tiling and patterning, the work disassembles and then reassembles maps that focus on the shapes, textures and color to recreate new territories. These collages are part abstractions part designed object that use universal language to communicate alternate modes of perceiving land and space.
Tristesse has been an art teacher for 14 years with the Vancouver School Board, is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a mom of two beautiful children.
She explains the work by saying, “I am collaging historical maps fusing cartography and geometry to create new spaces and places that coax the brain to drift from the analytical to the sensory, and to delight in what is sensual, familiar, and universal. With the use of maps abstracted into pieces, my work becomes rich with metaphor, as both universal and personal meaning about ways of perceiving the known and unknown are explored, and notions of territory are revisited. The viewer can see the art objects as a collection of tiny map events or as an intact experience, as the work transforms what was into something new.”.
