CHANTING GROTTO, metallic gouache on paper, 2.5 x 5.5 m, 2023. photographer: Tracy Peters

Bev Pike is a Winnipeg artist known for gigantic immersive paintings of architectural utopias. She bases her current series on eccentric three hundred year-old subterranean grottos in England. 

These grottos provide ornate places of contemplation within pastoral landscapes. Grotto interiors are encrusted with sea shells, semi-precious gemstone chunks,  small quartz shingles all in intricate mystical designs.

Pike is fascinated with underground refuges like bomb shelters and quirky English Baroque follies. She is interested in spaces that transcend above-ground catastrophes.

To that end, Pike is creating paintings that lead from one to the next within a labyrinth of grottos. Her web of caves contains such amenities as stables, dance hall, lakeside tearoom, spa, séance parlours, a secret rendezvous hideaway and a greenhouse.

In all her work, Pike makes allusion to eccentric architecture of the past and its embodied experience in the present while imagining antidotes to an apocalyptic future.

Pike shows her work in major public art galleries across Canada, most recently at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Museum London (London), St. Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Estevan Art Gallery (Saskatchewan). In addition, she is the recipient of many major grants from the Canada Council, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. 

Pike also creates humorous, provocative and feminist Agony Aunt columns in artist books that are in international special collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern, University of Bristol and others in England, Canada, Iceland and the USA.  She has been a guest speaker from coast to coast.  Finally, as a long-time community activist, Pike writes evidence-based satire for the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC, MSN, etc.

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bev_Pike

Documentary

https://www.jeffmckay.org/films/bev-pike

Pike’s studio is on Treaty 1 Territory and ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Denesuline, Nehethowuk Nations, and on the traditional homeland of the Red River Métis Nation.