HAPPY GERMAINE KOH PORTRAIT MONDAY!

Today's Portrait Monday is brought to you by Vancouver's own Germaine Koh.

Germaine Koh is best known for quiet but ingenious works such as Fallow (2005), for which she relocated a swathe of land from a nearby vacant lot to the inside of a gallery. The grass grew, plants pushed up and died, and small creatures scurried about. Sequestered away like that, we were suddenly, almost magically, made aware of the minutiae that comes together to make up the natural world, and the changes that happen almost imperceptibly within it.

Self-portrait (ongoing since 1994) is another work that deals with near-imperceptible changes in life. It is closely related to Knitwork (ongoing since 1992), a textile work that Koh knits together regularly from unravelled old sweaters in order to create a physical documentation of the passage of time. Self-portrait functions much in the same manner, as Koh layers portrait over portrait in oil paint on the same board. Ongoing since 1994, it is often displayed with documentation of its previous states. In this way, it connects the process of painting with that of aging -- a slow accumulation of sudden or subtle changes.