Tia Halliday
Tia Halliday’s work is dedicated to “disorienting our relationship to painting,” a goal she accomplishes by creating her three-dimensional pieces from the inside out.
In the case of her three Biennial pieces, on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Halliday began by sewing what she calls a “painting skin,” a kind of fabric representation of an abstract painting. She likens these to that elementary-school favourite, the parachute. “Think of that on a smaller scale,” she says. Then she hired five Alberta Ballet dancers to perform beneath the skin. Working from photos she took of the dancers, Halliday then digitally cut out the shapes created by the bodies under the fabric and printed them on aluminum.
The printing uses a process called dye sublimation, which “cooks” the image into the aluminum, creating, in Halliday’s words, “an esthetic that is more real than real.” Two of her three Biennial pieces—“Side Show,” “Circus II”—are “digital collages of photographs of the performance work” and use the printing process to create a trompe l’oeil. “You can see a hand or you can see a bit of a face coming out from under the fabric,” Halliday says. For her third piece, “Monochrome II,” Halliday did not combine images from the shoot. “It’s just the performers under the fabric, cut out of a photo,” she says.
Halliday’s work draws on two longstanding passions: dance and visual art. “I was the kid who was dancing four hours after school every day,” she says. She pursued her interest in art at the Alberta College of Art + Design and Concordia University, but it wasn’t until she was teaching—first at ACAD, currently at the University of Calgary—that she made the connection between her two passions. “I was thinking about painting and the language used to talk about abstract painting when we teach,” she recalls. Much of that language draws on the thoughts of the American critic and educator Harold Rosenberg, who coined the term “action painting” in the early 1950s. Halliday was intrigued by Rosenberg’s use of push and pull terminology. “I thought, ‘Ah, push and pull—that sounds like choreographic language. That sounds like dance.’”