Curated by Cliff Eyland.

I was born in Toronto in 1955, and grew up in a Toronto suburb. At that time [this] setting offered a relatively homogeneous, Anglo-Saxon North American horizon inflected by cultural ties to Britain. Art was painting, and ‘Canadian art’ was, for Torontonians, a group of largely Toronto-based painters who had worked in the late 1920s and early 30s to develop a nationalistic school of symbolic landscape art, painted in a Post-Impressionist manner. These artists would venture out into the ‘North’ and register their motifs en plein air on intimately scaled panels which they would later work up in larger, more stylized studio versions. The European old masters lurked in the back of our consciousness as distant generative fathers. Canadian art was understood to be different. [This quotation and those that follow are from an unpublished 1996 statement that Armstrong used as the basis for an artist's talk at the Institut für Kunst in Erfurt, Germany.]

The art schools I attended in Canada (in Toronto and in Sackville, New Brunswick) in the mid-1970s presented conflicted views of painting in relation to contemporary art practice, and generally tended to think of vital contemporary art as being American in origin. One camp held up heroic-scale American abstractionist painting as the model; the other camp was highly suspicious of painting as a viable vehicle for contemporary practice, and characterized painting as being mired in Eurocentric, patriarchal transcendentalism and, further, as participating in consumer commodity exchange. The [proposed] antidotes to painting were the more art historically innocent media of performance, video, and installation. Artworks in these media often referred to the ‘real’ experiences, or even to the actual body of the artist. These experiences could be as formal or procedural as abstract painting’s own conventions, or they could address social experience such as gender, sexual orientation, and, in rare cases, class or race. (The notion that one did either abstract painting or dealt with ‘content’ in another medium was a silly dichotomy.) The necessity of producing an object was also in question as was the usefulness of exhibiting in the anodyne space of modernist white cube galleries. Again, the models for performative or conceptual art were most often American. (ibid.)

In 1990, my visual vocabulary sorted itself out to include superimposed male first names derived from commercial products, floating on elaborated grounds reminiscent of 1950s abstractionist painting surfaces, and framed by two-dimensional arrangements of roses. The floral borders and some of the text was loosely based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pioneer headstones which I had made sketches of that summer while living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Although the funereal references in the finished paintings are not overwhelming, I came to think of them as marking out not so much the death of painting as the death of the male hegemony in painting — given the preponderance of male names. (I don’t mean to suggest that this suggestion of the funereal is anyway melancholic, or even to do with the killing of a name; in point of fact, given the many hours that comprise the manufacture of my paintings, I evolved an affectionate relationship to the possibility of the demise of the names.) The paintings’ overall appearance is anachronistic, with elements that might be associated with Victorian through modern design. Being composed of many layers of paint as well as incredibly fussy, intricate passages, I had hoped that they might further point to the difficulty of rendering or reading time: by not easily disclosing just how long it might have taken to paint such a picture. Of course, the whole procedure of making an easel painting of actual cut roses is in itself technologically and anesthetically outmoded. Roses may lend themselves quite readily to such an enterprise as their own meaning is so trafficked as to be nearly impossible to pin down. But despite all of this bracketed and conditional hedging about (and I do hope that my paintings do not read as assemblages of parodic winks), roses and other foliate bits can be handily edged along into the treacherous territory of the beautiful.