About the Artist
Artist, Frank Perna, born in Oakville, Ontario in 1960, is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and is currently working out of Toronto, Canada. He is best known for a recent series of paintings concerning international stock exchange floors. Other projects include the Kennedy Subway Station Mural as well as numerous commissions for feature films, TV movies and commercials. Perna has also worked on two large Frank Stella projects. His work has been exhibited in Toronto, Vancouver, New York and Florence, Italy. His recent solo shows featured photo realist oil paintings that source photo-journalist imagery from world wide stock exchange floors and focus on microcosms of their blurred activities. His 2005 show at Noho Gallery in Chelsea, NY was supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada.
Collections: Yoyo Ma, Canada Council Art Bank
Contact the artist in Toronto at 416. 588.3668
All works on this site without red dots are for sale.
Any work can be reproduced in any size.
The red dot indicates sold work or commissioned work.
TRANZAC CLUB
"Frontliners and Backgrounders"
Frontliners:
Individuals wearing Tyvek or hasmat suits and
personal protective equipment using spraying tools to disinfect,
fertilize and or make safe environments for others.
Backgrounders:
Scenic artists in the film industry (myself included) who
occasionally wear similar P.P.E. using spray equipment to render
sets with multi-layer effects to create backgrounds for feature films and TV.
I look forward to seeing you at the gallery to reveal
what I've been up to during the pandemic when
I'm not working as a scenic artist.
PRESS RELEASE
Frontliners and Backgrounders:
This series began as a group of unresolved abstractions that suggest exterior/interior spaces as well as landscapes. The figures were drawn literally from social media, printed in various sizes, painted in oil and collaged onto the abstractions giving them scale and potential context as indicated by the titles. They are anonymous, masked everyman/women involved in ambiguous applications using spray tools and spritzer wands, affecting their environment. They are self portraits, astronauts, as well as "Chauncey Gardeners". They are also a nod to the absurdity of "Bitumen", scarecrows left on tailing ponds from oilfields intended to frighten waterfowl away from landing on toxic oil byproducts.
Toronto artist Frank Perna has been a scenic artist in the film industry for 32 years and a member of IATSE 873 since 1999. He has worked and executed backgrounds on various T.V. and feature films including Guillermo Del Toro's "The Strain" and academy award winner "The Shape of Water".
Due to his passion for painting as an individual and the sometimes toxic nature of film work, Perna has balanced his time between film and using downtime to participate in group and solo shows in art galleries. He showed his original artwork at "Off Camera" in 2008 at Pinewood Studios where he co -curated a show of 65 artists in the film industry composed of members of IATSE 873 and members of the Directors Guild of Canada in an 18,000 square foot studio.
Perna has also exhibited installation art at St Anne's church during Nuit Blanche 2019, a 20'x20' double video projection/double ambient soundtrack entitled "Wet Worlds". This work is a speculative meditation installation as a hypothetical overview above Earths’ wetlands waterways and islands.
