JOE THOMSON SAAN
2025 | JOE THOMSON
SAAN
Oct 24 - Dec, 2025
Opening Reception: October 24, 2025, 6-8 pm.
Joe Thomson, Westinghouse HQ, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 in.
Saan was a department store in the small town I grew up in. I remember going there as a child, in the night, when it felt especially bright and especially empty. For many of the paintings in this show I stopped thinking about meaning and I focused instead on appearance. I tried to make images that looked good, permitting a nothingness into the pictures. I’ve always felt that beauty was one of the least interesting and most important aspects of visual art and so my efforts have been centred around conceits, feeling that appearances could be taken into consideration after and not before significance. There was always a frustration present in this approach; a consistent failure to locate and preserve substance or truth despite this being my primary aim. For this show I created a series of vacant paintings and in doing so I found that meaning is as difficult to create as it is to suppress. It can become interesting if you make something sufficiently empty; if you can get an image to the point where it’s not doing anything, because it’s impossible for something to not do anything. Saan was a chain that originated in Winnipeg. It was started in 1947 and went bankrupt in 2008.
-Joe Thomson