Angell Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the work of Kristine Moran, a recent graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, who mines through her love/hate relationship with media-based Pop Culture to make cheerfully charming pictures of breakdown, bedlam, and obliteration.

Moran crafts expressive landscapes from a problematic future, one where cars optimistically fly along floating highways but cannot seem to avoid crashing into dark and energetic explosions of thickly luscious paint. Sanguine architectural elements drawn from sci-fi films like Minority Report, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and The Matrix contextualize retro-styled vehicles in digital atmospheres also reminiscent of Japanese Anime Manga. These are urban spaces where the angst of modern city living collides with speed-driven techno-culture.

Commanding heavily-armed incursions into 'Boy Art' territory, Moran entices viewers with raucous and gorgeous moments of violence as spectacle. The accidents, explosions, and disasters she applies with confident impasto handling of oil onto flat enamel backgrounds are meant to resemble the manner in which the mass media aestheticizes the violence of a chaotic world for our anesthetized consumption. Through endless repetition and graphic packaging of destruction and terror, the media creates a dividing space between viewers and reality. Moran works in this space, not in order to exploit it but in an attempt to show us this comfortable place where action is always violent and sugar-coated delicious. "My paintings are a reflection of an innate desire to be witness to violence," she says, "yet without any real emotional commitment."

These are fast paintings. Cars whiz past, nanoseconds before they erupt into hazardous shards of color and form. Action occurs in nothing but a moment; blink and you'll miss it! Here is what happens when we lose control of faster and faster systems as they get more and more complicated. Broadband internet, instant messaging, MTV-style rapid editing, multilane freeways... Moran's paintings use the car accident as a symbol of chaotic destruction to scream a warning about the dangers inherent in a system so fast it is beyond comprehension.

Merging abstraction and representation, Moran's paintings emerge from a new tradition in painting lead by Inka Essinghigh, Cecily Brown, Julie Merhetu, and Jay Davis. They are also influenced by her training in landscape architecture at Ryerson University and her travels around the world as an Air Canada flight attendant while she worked her way through art school at OCAD. She has exhibited in many group shows in Toronto, where she works and lives, but this is her first solo effort. She likes to read the futurist works of Paul Virilio and James Gleick because they teach her how to sit back as the world ends and enjoy the show.