Deborah Root

Deborah Root came of age during the Vietnam War, in a family deeply affected by World War II. As a child, she listened to her father’s and grandfather’s stories of the Pacific war, alongside the accounts of women who experienced life on the home front. "The war" was a constant presence in her family’s life, with the once-assumed certainty of U.S. victory challenged during the Vietnam War.

Much of Root’s recent work explores the impact of these wars within the family, incorporating seemingly dissonant images from art history, advertising illustration, and photography. Forms blur and bleed into one another, while elements are cut off—yet a narrative still emerges. Her fragmented compositions and bold colors heighten moments of disconnection in both social and familial contexts. Meanwhile, the relative flatness of the objects surrounding the central figures emphasizes the stagelike quality that defines many of the moments she portrays.

"My hope is that a particular image might link up to a vast constellation of associations, whose symbolic nuances have migrated and transformed over historical time and geographic space yet remain embedded in the image. These intuitive associations evoke personal, psychological truths, or broader cultural narratives." Deborah Root

Deborah Root's influences include Gothic art and early Spanish apocalypses, drawn to the contrast between the flatness of the images and the intricate arrangement of material on the page. She has also been influenced by pre-European Mexican conventions of representation, particularly the pictorial texts that function like storyboards. Eric Fischl’s depictions of suburban anxiety revealed to Root the narrative possibilities within such imagery, while the complex compositions of contemporary painter Kerry James Marshall—especially his integration of graphic design elements and bold color—have had a profound impact on her work. Currently, she is exploring the work of female Surrealists, with a particular focus on Leonora Carrington.

In addition to being a visual artist working primarily in painting, Deborah Root is a cultural critic and writer whose arts writing explores the relationship between visual art and cultural politics. Her catalog contributions include in-depth essays on Sarindar Dhaliwal, Laureana Toledo, Jorge Lozano, Ximena Cuevas, and Annie Pootoogook. Her work has appeared in Art Papers, Prefix Photo, Public, C Magazine, the Contact Photography and Bienal de São Paulo catalogs, as well as other Canadian and international journals. Most recently, her writing has been featured in Rebecca Garrett: Search and Transmotion. Root is also the author of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference and has taught visual art and cultural politics at OCAD University, the University of Guelph, and Bilkent University in Turkey.

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