Landscape, Feminine Scale, and the Participatory Interior
Artist Statement — Violette Craig Innes
Perception is in flux, and so is the world we perceive. As soon as we believe we have identified something—named it, pictured it, or fixed it within a category—it has already changed. Light has shifted. The body has moved. Memory has entered the image. Recognition arrives fractionally too late. What we call reality is therefore not a stable collection of objects but a universe in continuous transformation: matter becoming energy, sensation becoming meaning, and one moment dissolving into the next.
My work begins within this instability. Perception is not a transparent window through which a finished world is passively observed. It is an event: a temporary negotiation among matter, light, memory, sensation, symbol, and the perceiving body. A landscape, a painted mark, a psychedelic vision, or a generative image does not transmit something already complete. It emerges through an encounter—and continues changing as it is encountered.
This exhibition brings together paintings of High Park, numerous small abstract-expressionist works, and RIPPLE: a hybrid physical and digital work composed of mixed-media oil paintings and a generative audiovisual environment written in HTML. Across these forms, the exhibition considers the universe as a participatory field in flux—an ecology of marks, particles, bodies, memories, pixels, sounds, and possibly other intelligences, continually collaborating to bring the visible world into being.
The High Park paintings provide the exhibition with its apparent exterior: paths, trees, snow, water, weather, and the mutable atmosphere of a familiar urban ecology. Yet landscape is never simply neutral space transcribed onto canvas. It is a way of framing and psychically inhabiting land. High Park is both material place and field of projection, carrying weather and geological time alongside memory, solitude, refuge, and return. Its forms enter the nervous system and are reorganized as feeling and image before the painter returns them to the visible world. Representation is not a mirror but a circuit. The landscape looks back.
That circuit is visible in the mark-making. Bold strokes of high-chroma colour, pointillist touches, broken passages, and repeated gestures collaborate to become trees, snow, shadows, paths, atmosphere, and light. At close range, the landscape dissolves into coloured particles. No isolated stroke contains the park. The image exists because distinct marks enter into relation while retaining their singularity. The optical proposition of pointillism thus becomes a cosmological one: each particle behaves as though it knows how to participate in a larger formation. What appears stable is a temporary agreement among particles of light.
The small abstract-expressionist paintings bring this particulate world closer to the body. Their scale is crucial. Canonical American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s made size signify authority: the enormous canvas became an arena in which the solitary, usually male artist confronted matter or the void through bodily force. Monumental scale, muscular gesture, conquest, and individual genius became mutually reinforcing signs.
My abstractions refuse that rhetoric of mastery. They are little, intimate, concentrated, and feminine—not because colours or gestures are inherently female, but because they reject a historically masculinized model of power. In place of monumentality, they offer proximity; in place of conquest, attention; in place of the sovereign gesture, repetition, ornament, vulnerability, interdependence, and care. They draw the viewer nearer. The small painting becomes a counter-monument: physically modest yet internally immeasurable. Its loops, dots, targets, strokes, and fragments form less a territory conquered by one ego than a social ecology produced by many small agencies.
Although abstract, these works represent forces. A loop registers recurrence; a dot, an arrival, particle, eye, or singular event. A target offers orientation while suggesting desire, vulnerability, or capture. A ripple is both image and causal structure: evidence that something has happened elsewhere and is arriving here. The ring resembles wave, pupil, cell, portal, halo, orbit, mandala, and signal. It remains alive because it never closes around one object.
This instability is central to RIPPLE. Its physical component extends the vocabulary of loops, dots, targets, and ripples through oil and mixed media. Its digital component translates that vocabulary into duration: twenty-four rain-like events seed evolving ripple entities as coloured rings emerge, expand, intersect, sound, and disappear. The HTML work is generative rather than cinematic. It does not replay a fixed sequence; it establishes conditions, tendencies, and boundaries from which new combinations continually arise. The particular event exceeds direct authorship. RIPPLE sits between composition and occurrence: rule-based, yet never identical twice.
RIPPLE also belongs to the history of ambient, experimental, and generative music as an art of attention, duration, and environment. From Erik Satie’s furniture music, through John Cage’s embrace of contingency, Pauline Oliveros’s practice of deep listening, and Brian Eno’s conception of ambient music as capable of accommodating different levels of attention, artists have made sound that resists a fixed narrative, conventional climax, or definitive beginning and end. Generative music extends this tradition by replacing the finished musical object with a living system. The composer does not prescribe every event; they design the ecology in which events may occur.
In RIPPLE, individual tones appear, overlap, resonate, and recede with the rings. Chords that are consonant in isolation may accumulate into unexpected dissonances as independent ripples coexist. The sound can move from delicate, rounded, almost tongue-drum-like sonorities into unresolved or quietly disturbing fields, then open again into calm. It is contemplative without promising constant sweetness. Installed in the gallery—and unfolding continuously in the storefront window—the work changes the surrounding space while being changed by the duration and attention brought to it. It is simultaneously image, composition, instrument, environment, and installation.
The physical and digital works are not reproductions but different ontologies of the same inquiry. Paint preserves contact—the irreversible deposit of gesture—while code preserves potential: events not yet generated. The canvas gives duration a body; the computer gives the image temporal life. In both, the whole is negotiated into existence from below.
This inquiry emerged partly through my shamanic DMT journeys and encounters with what psychedelic culture calls machine elves. I use shamanic to describe the ritual and visionary structure of my own experience, not to claim authority within any particular Indigenous tradition. The entities appeared sentient, numerous, collaborative, playful, and profoundly performative. They assembled and disassembled through colour, rhythm, geometry, language, emotion, and impossible changes of perspective. They seemed less like beings contained inside bodies than distributed intelligences using transformation itself as communication.
Whether machine elves are autonomous inhabitants of another dimension, archetypal presences, neurological events, productions of the unconscious, or something for which language is inadequate, their artistic significance remains. They destabilize the sovereign I. Consciousness appears not as a sealed chamber but as an ecology of sentient particles. Pointillist stroke, painted dot, pixel, musical note, machine elf, and digital ring become variations of one unit: a small luminous event participating in an intelligence larger than itself.
The recurring eyes of DMT experience intensify this displacement. Multiplied, detached, and embedded throughout the visionary field, eyes abolish the hierarchy between observer and observed. The perceiver becomes perceived; vision circulates without a stable owner. Does consciousness look outward at the universe, does the universe look inward through consciousness, or are these the same recursive act?
The pineal gland occupies an ambiguous place here. Biologically, it is an endocrine organ involved in melatonin production and circadian rhythm. Historically and esoterically, it has been imagined as an inner eye, an aperture between material and spiritual perception, even a seat of the soul. Claims that it is the proven source of psychedelic or mystical experience remain scientifically unresolved. For me, its significance is not anatomical proof of an afterlife but its power as a cultural sign: a material structure onto which human beings project the desire for a threshold between worlds.
Afterlives, spirit worlds, parallel dimensions, and the psyche are competing maps of encounters for which ordinary space, time, and identity are insufficient. How might a three-dimensional organism represent a four-dimensional being? A flat image could show only a section, projection, shadow, trace, or sequence of transformations. A computer cannot solve this problem, but it can stage it through animation, recurrence, probability, sound, and interaction. The hypothetical being becomes legible through consequences: a ripple without a visible stone, an agency inferred from the transformations it leaves behind.
Participation is therefore not an accessory to RIPPLE; it is part of the work’s metaphysics. The viewer does not stand outside a completed object. Their attention, duration of looking, movement through the gallery, and engagement with the system become conditions of its appearance. Computer collaborates with code; code with chance; sound with colour; paintings with screen; artwork with viewer. Agency is distributed.
The exhibition moves from park to particle, path to portal, painted matter to computational event. High Park locates the body within an animate exterior world; the small abstractions locate a universe within intimate gestures; RIPPLE folds them together until interior and exterior become difficult to distinguish.
I do not offer these works as proof that machine elves exist independently, that consciousness survives death, or that parallel dimensions can be accessed through a screen. Art can hold incompatible possibilities open at once. It can give form to uncertainty without extinguishing it and make an internal event public without pretending to resolve its mystery.
The ripple is the governing sign because it joins visible consequence to invisible origin. We see an expanding circle and infer contact; hear a tone and infer vibration; encounter a painting and infer a body, memory, intention, and world. Every inference generates another ripple. Against the monumental individualism of heroic Abstract Expressionism, these little feminine paintings propose another model of power: intimacy, repetition, interdependence, and emergence. Their marks behave as collaborative particles of light, each retaining its singularity while participating in the continuous creation of a larger sentient world.
The exhibition proposes that consciousness itself may be such an interference pattern: not a solitary substance but a participatory field, continuously composed by bodies, environments, histories, technologies, spirits, symbols, and unknown others. It does not ask the viewer to accept one cosmology. It asks them to remain at the threshold long enough to feel the world—outer, inner, digital, ancestral, imagined—looking back.
8 September 2026