Tracey Breitbach

Tracey Breitbach discovered her artistic voice while growing up in the small capital of Yellowknife a gold mining boomtown on the North Arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.  Growing up on the edge of the arctic wilderness equipped the artist with a detailed knowledge of the sub-arctic textures represented in her oil and acrylic paintings. From an early age she was fascinated in the sub-arctic terrain that surrounded her:  Particularly the ancient rocky hills she explored as a child and the small delicate life that lay underfoot.

Her style has been described as ‘Magnifying Minutia’, her paintings often include close-up and enlarged views of lichen and the cracked, mottled patterns found in Canadian Shield rock, arctic flora and bodies of fish. She stretches her own canvases, often abandoning rectangular borders for less conventional frame-shapes.

Tracey received her formal training from the Emily Carr Institute of Art in Vancouver, B.C where she studied painting, installation art and photography.  She then went on to explore other avenues earning an Interdisciplinary fine arts degree at Concordia University in Montreal specializing in theatre design, play writing, performance art and video. 

Upon her graduation in 2000 Tracey toured across Canada with a theatre company as a projectionist and set designer. She became known for her slide images made out of translucent fish skin, molten wax and other off beat organic materials. The magnified images that served as theatrical backdrops were reminiscent of landscapes and the shield rock of her home. In 2001 she returned to Yellowknife and took on the fulltime role of Executive and Artistic Director for Folk on the Rocks, a music and cultural festival, for the next seven years. During this time she started to paint again, gathering hundreds of photographic references for her work while out camping, boating, and fishing with her family in the wild regions of the N.W.T. Preferring to work large some of Tracey’s paintings span eight feet across.

In 2008Tracey held her first solo exhibition of Northern themed paintings. In typical Northern style her show took place at an in ice castle, in a blizzard on the frozen ice of Yellowknife bay.

I’ve always been happiest creating art that evokes confrontation and interaction at a human level. The North speaks powerfully to me in this regard. It is a savage and overwhelmingly brutal place and could crush you like an ant in an instant, yet the life is so small, delicate and intricate.  How it struggles to grow and how long it takes to grow is purely miraculous.  Capturing and magnifying this fascinate me.  In my own way I am trying to map some kind of uncharted landscape perhaps invisible to the human eye.