Jennie Toby
Niagara, NY & Canada
Emerging abstract painter exploring memory, perception, and material experience.
Message
Jennie Toby is an abstract painter based in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada. Born in Tampa, Florida, she came of age in New York City, where nearly two decades of living among museums, galleries, and contemporary artists fostered a lasting interest in abstraction, material experimentation, and process-based painting. She is a self-taught artist working primarily in oil- with various works including wax, mica, pigment, and sand gathered from the shores of the Great Lakes. Her layered paintings explore the intersection of memory, perception, and material experience. Toby's work has been exhibited at the Erie Art Museum, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, with an upcoming group exhibition at the Carnegie Art Center.
Statement
I am interested in the moment when something unfamiliar feels strangely known, as if it belongs to a memory that cannot be placed.
Each painting begins with a collection of materials for the surface and the feeling that something is waiting to emerge. As I work, forms slowly appear and disappear again. They borrow from landscapes, the body, botanical structures, and geology, but they never fully become any one thing.
The paintings are built over many layers of oil paint and at times mixed with various materials to create an expressive surface. I respond to each layer rather than trying to control it, allowing the painting to reveal itself over time. The process doesn't answer the question that drives the work, rather, it moves me deeper into it: How can abstract forms be so reminiscent of somewhere primordial—a place we knew before we ever existed?
I don't know the answer, but I keep returning to the canvas because painting is the only place where I can investigate that question. Sometimes an image appears that feels less invented than discovered. It carries a strange sense of recognition, as though it belongs to a place I have never seen and yet somehow remember.
The materials are an important part of that search because the surface of each painting is a physical presence that anchors these imagined environments in the real world. I'm intrigued by the tension between the tactile reality of the painting and the intangible nature of memory. I hope the work invites viewers into that same space of curiosity, where recognition and uncertainty can exist together.