Spinoza's work embodies rationalism, humanism, clarity, and a breaking away from a restricted world view of proscribed dogma. In Chaos, my 30” x 50” print on perforated vinyl in this exhibition, I have explored the image of the lion of Judah, a familiar symbol of stretching, searching, and power often in use in Jewish culture. Through his knowledge of Jewish texts, ritual, iconography, and customs, Spinoza would have been familiar with and understood the meaning of the lion of Judah. Additionally, Chaos recalls another metaphor of searching and power, that of the grand equestrian sculpture of the Renaissance, a period in the history of art when artists began to feel free to deal with subject material other than religion, and were breaking taboos of content, material, meaning, and approaches to life.

Susan Turner is a Canadian artist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and works in printmaking and video. Her work focuses on loss, accident, and the role of memory in forming and reforming our lives. She is interested in liminality and the richnesss of in-between spaces and the transitions and hovering boundaries between forms, spaces, and readings of them. Through abstraction and working with colour, light, and texture, she juggles chaotic states to create multi-layered images that yield enigmatic, unexpected readings of familiar forms that point to the transitory and the sublime and where interiors and exteriors collide.

Susan Turner has exhibited in solo and group shows in Canada, Argentina, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan (ISEA Festival of Electronic Art), South Korea, UK, US, and on-line. Her work is in public and private collections and has been supported by grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, Jewish Foundation of Manitoba, and through residencies at Banff Centre for the Arts. She has served on boards and juries in Winnipeg’s artist community and taught at the School of Art University of Manitoba. In 2017, Turner founded ARTA, an informal project-based artist collective of Winnipeg artists. Additionally, she has curated and designed major exhibitions for heritage institutions. She is a fellow of Jewish Art Salon.