Art over the years. Painting and sculpture, with handmade canvases and sometimes found material.

Drawings and ideas from my sketchbooks. These generally make up my creative process and filter ideas. Absorbing what interests me becomes notes or drawings in the margins. Their images and thoughts often inform approaches to my art work.

“Mid Breath” is a painting series focused on the everyday.  The visible yet forgotten spaces of our daily lives within Edmonton's Urbanism. Half built, falling apart or half remembered architecture. I capture the  brief moment when you are passing these structures in order to question their validity or understand their importance.  Design of a city is a reflection on our changing values and therefor a portrait of our intentions.  To explore what this means to me and the viewer I capture intimate scenes of seemingly un-important places or moments.  I create paintings set in the mundane yet pervasive landscape of buildings one calls home in order to test our sense of awareness.  By giving these depictions a new sense of beauty I hope to reinterpret what we tend to walk by everyday. Ergo, these are paintings of places you might pass "Mid Breath" without noticing.

“… found objects, or ‘junk’ in their works, collecting and sublimating the rejected and overlooked artifacts from Edmonton’s back alleys and bins into meditations that create a portrait of urban life in Alberta’s capital city. When foraging for materials to creatively repurpose, the yield here seems plentiful. And out of the shadows and grime, our gleaners recontextualize objects into new forms that contemplate value, spiritual components of creation and waste, and life in the urban realm. ….

… through a series of paintings and found-object sculptures, Riley Tenove seeks understanding of his own urban life in Edmonton. Often depicting scenes and observances from his environment, Tenove integrates found object into his work both as surfaces to be painted upon, and featured items. His works play with reality and narrative, often representing and integrating found objects, notes, symbols and memories in collision. Some also explore how features in our urban environment can be mimicked in form through the junk collected by the artist. “

These works depict spaces within the process of understanding my Urban life. They are filled with symbols, notes and memories, often in collision.  These subjects are everyday places sometimes obscured by abstraction or sketchbook references. They're paintings of my environment and are looking for new meaning in a urban world. To perceive spaces anew they must first be "Un-made".

The Lock-Down is a unique moment in history. I, like many, are trapped with themselves while we figure out how to navigate it. In that spirit, the “LockDown Sketches” are new and old drawings re-developed and revisited. Between words and image the sketches are playing with the value of habitual creations. Please feel free to copy or fill characters with empty word bubbles. They are their for you to play with and finish with your expressions. Personally, these drawings are often about me trying to refocus my thoughts on empathy and what feels important.

A reflection to being made during the Covid epidemic, these canvases are treated like a sticky tape picking up information in the storm of Covid’s effect on cities and politics. I think about the disconnect between our basic needs, human senses, and what we do in communities.

How do we live together in such atomized urban environments if they can’t evolve fast enough? Are these choices about control or adaptation? I’am of the the opinion that technology amplifies the good intentions along with our unseen trauma and racial morality. Sketches of these topics were expanded upon stressed and coloured Canvases to explore my own frustrations.

The thin colours mean to reflect technologies hectic manner upon our minds. Much like how the technology of acrylic itself is an imitation of traditional painting practice, I want to contemplate current technology and spaces attempt to imitate imperfect minds, tools and functions.

When pen or ink is used on paper, it scars the surface. The warped figures I draw are made with layers of crosshatches and marks. Through an automated drawing process, the artworks are guided by vague stories and experiences churning through my mind. I find the universal language of the human form useful in translating these questions and fears into symbolic characters playing out their stories. My ideas are often influenced by how long-term pain alters the body and mind because I face similar challenges with back pain. The figures I draw float in the ambiguous space of the page, influenced by each other and their combined narrative. Because the process eliminates the opportunity for correction, I am forced to reconcile every new mark with the whole. Wherever these creatures reside is a mystery to me, but it feels simultaneously close yet far away.