painting diner interiorFill the Ketchup by Melanie Janisse-Barlow, acrylic on canvas.

Paintings explore daily existence

The Gallery at the School of Creative Arts is currently hosting an exhibition of new paintings by artists Richard Storms and Melanie Janisse-Barlow titled “Channel Surfing.”

The exhibition aims to shed light upon the perceived small subjects of daily existence. Snapshots of daily life are often cataloged through the medium of photography. In the analogue, images are locked away in private albums, lining basements, attics, and storage bins, and in the digital, they are being shared and multiplied across online platforms, their ubiquitous presence in some ways rendering them even more ordinary.

Storms conveys subjects inspired from popular culture as paintings, hoping to give them more of a specific weight than the long history of the medium can offer, while also using the subjects themselves as a vehicle to explore representation in painting. On view in this exhibition is a collection of paintings that are arresting, provocative, and tender examples of this suspension of the shifting planes of news media and popular culture as it roams by on our screens.

Janisse-Barlow surfs the waves of personal memory, private analogue photographic collections, and extracts the essences of different spaces and times, aiming to garner the psychic and emotive qualities of a physical space or a scene. For this exhibition, Janisse-Barlow presents a collection of works that best describe the Windsor-Detroit energy. These works range across her bodies of work on the Lafayette Coney Island, Fraser Studios, and include a few new works from a study of the Windsor 1980s music scene.

The SoCA Armouries is located at 37 University Ave. East. More information is available on the SoCA Gallery webpage.

“Channel Surfing” is open through Oct. 11 by appointment; the artists will be in attendance for public viewings without an appointment from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays, Sept. 30 and Oct. 7.

A public reception from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6, will be followed by a celebration at Janisse-Barlow’s studio space, 1017 Church St.