TORONTO.- Through richly painted cityscapes, Sears explores how car travel dictates our perspective of the landscape and provides us with fragmented memories of our environment. Windows distort our sight lines. Interior colors leak into the exterior scene. Light absorbs and spreads across scuffed-up glass, altering our view. Reflective surfaces such as mirror and metal bounce beams of light between each other, exaggerating the luminosity of outside light sources.

Presenting the view of Passenger, Sears constructs a movement-based experience within a static landscape, separated from sites by glass, rubber, and steel.

Val Sears (b.1988) is a Toronto-based artist born in Oshawa, Ontario. She recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Art from OCAD University in 2012 and was selected to receive the David W. Bain award for her thesis series This Place Then. She was also recently awarded Best Student Painter at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. Although she works in various mediums, painting is her primary focus as she continues to explore color, texture, and processes to depict the everyday.

Through her paintings, Sears investigates the reliance we have on accustomed environments, and how the inevitable changes taking place upon the land alter our sense of place within the social landscape. As a reference to time, her source material consists of her own analog photographs. By combing these photographs with an interpretation of the current condition of the North American landscape, Sears constructs surfaces that represent a transitory place, both within the mind and upon the land.