In her work, Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology and memory. Her paintings are arrangements assembled from various fragments: outtakes from painting’s history, elements from her own snapshots, colour notes, memory. Each painting is both an invention and a response to place that she knows and has recorded. She is interested in how location or landscape can trigger memory; akin to how painting readily conjures its own past. This history reveals how aesthetics, among other factors, have operated to tame nature into landscape, and the artifice and assumptions underlying this error.
Over the past fifteen years her canvases have been exhibited in Canada; London, England, and New York. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her project, Translation as a Strategy of Renewal in Painting. Tap’s work is represented in private, corporate and public collections in Canada and the U.S. Originally from Alberta, Monica Tap completed her BFA and MFA degrees at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Toronto and is a Professor at the University of Guelph.