October 17 – November 22, 2025
Interior View
2025 Artist-In-Residence Exhibition
The Main Gallery
Opening Reception for Members and Guests: Friday October 17th, 7 – 9 pm
Free admission
Riisa Gundesen’s upcoming exhibition, Interior View, reimagines the Western art historical trope of the nude in the boudoir, reframing this voyeuristic tradition through a deeply personal and abject lens. Her painted scenes — set in the bathroom, bedroom, and other intimate interiors — foreground the artist’s own body as both subject and symbol, navigating the intersections of gender, desire, consumerism, and aging.
The central figure, often a self-portrait, is surrounded by clutter: objects, costumes, and products associated with beauty, anti-aging, and wellness. These elements form a fantastical toilette — at times playful, grotesque, or absurd. Sensuous oil paint renders these objects with seductive pleasure, only to be unsettled by the intrusion of the bodily and the abject. Beauty products become relics in the ritual construction of femininity, while also symbolizing broader cultural anxieties around desirability, decay, and death.
Created during a year-long residency at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, the works are rendered in cutout forms layered over larger environments. Dimensional mylar elements hover over painted scenes, generating a disquieting tension between illusionistic space and physical depth. Interior spaces become dense, at times claustrophobic, or else strangely disconnected — abstracted and fragmented. Deep perspective and foreshortening are suggested illusionistically, while smaller cutout forms escape the picture plane entirely, spilling onto the wall or floor. This interplay between real and implied space challenges perception and creates an unease that shifts depending on the viewer’s position.
Boundaries within the works remain unstable. Figures dissolve into colour fields, textured wax, or scratched sgraffito surfaces. Grotesque undertones emerge: therapeutic sheet masks distort faces into blank, skull-like visages; piles of laundry and fabric obscure limbs and torsos, resembling shrouds. The bodily and the domestic collapse into each other.
Gundesen engages the abject elements of intimate space not only visually, but viscerally — provoking sensations of discomfort: a tightening of the throat, a rush of saliva, a jolt to the gut. These physical responses call the viewer back to their own body, interrupting the passive consumption of the painted nude and complicating the gaze. In Interior View, the intimate is not merely seen — it is felt.
Artist’s Biography
Riisa Gundesen (she/her) is an oil painter based in Edmonton, AB, on Treaty 6 Territory. Her practice centers on self-portraiture and still life, exploring the intersections of personal narrative, gender, consumerism, and the abject.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and artist-run centres across North America, with recent highlights including major group exhibitions at Contemporary Calgary, the Dunlop Art Gallery, and the Esplanade Centre. She has also presented solo exhibitions in St. John’s, NL; Ottawa, ON; and Utica, NY.
Gundesen’s work has been featured in publications such as Galleries West and The Capilano Review, and is held in the collections of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the University of Saskatchewan.
Riisa Gundesen holds a BFA from the University of Lethbridge (2012) and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan (2018). She currently teaches painting and drawing at the University of Alberta and MacEwan University.
Top Image: Bedroom Environment 1 (detail), 2025, oil on rag paper, 96 x 148 inch
Photo by the artist
