Toronto-based painter Mara Korkola is known for her captivating works that telescope entire vistas into compact frames. She frequently escapes her urban surroundings to hike and canoe in the wilderness, an innate attraction from her time spent growing up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. She often pairs paintings into diptych and triptych combinations, presenting slightly different views of the same location: a cottage bunkie at night, a misty bay at dusk, or a road lit only by moonlight. Like keyholes, her paintings draw us in and transport us into another time and space.
Mara Korkola was born in Marathon, Ontario in 1965. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto (AOCA); Wichita State University, Kansas (BFA) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio (MFA). She has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Germany, including Painting as Paradox at Artists Space in New York, Synthetic Psychosis at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Sequence and Passage at Cambridge Galleries, Ontario, Auto-Motive: World from the Windshield at Oakville Galleries, Ontario, and Commuter, a comprehensive solo exhibition of her No Place series of paintings at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario.