Stanzie Tooth’s latest drawings consider human experiences such as love, caregiving, and motherhood in nature. This series, The Blue Hour, suggests that, whether we acknowledge it or not, that the natural will persisted long before and much longer after us.

Tooth turns to a visual strategy that builds relationships between figure and
ground, existing as entangled in-between the foreground, mid-ground, and
background of her compositions. These absent- like figures are spectral visual symbols of the boundary between oneself and the wild. The creatures illustrated in her work exist as a form of circadian rhythm. The significance of light as daytime or the lack thereof as nighttime also plays into her largely non- linear narrative storytelling approach. Local pollinators, such as the Luna Moth and the Monarch, appear in her compositions as symbolic stand-ins for our human experience with growing, birth, and death. Their inclusion reflects our brief lifespan within landscapes that persist beyond the corporeal.

Stanzie Tooth holds a BFA from OCAD University and an MFA with distinction from the University of Ottawa. In 2015, she received the Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting, supporting residencies in Berlin, Iceland, Greece, and Italy. Her paintings draw from the forests of southern Ontario, where she spent her formative years, and engage art historical traditions through a bodily and intersectional experience of landscape. Her work is included in private and corporate collections, including Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank, Google, Equitable Bank, the A.T. Tolley Collection, the City of Ottawa, and St. Michael’s Hospital. Tooth lives and works in Toronto, Canada.