Jasmine Wallace at August Studios

Born in Prince George, British Columbia, Jasmine Wallace comes from a family of self-taught artists and grew up immersed in the artistic community of Vancouver Island. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota. Wallace has exhibited her work extensively throughout Canada and the United States.

Wallace's practice draws inspiration from the built environment as a framework for constructing space. Through abstraction, she investigates how real, imagined, and implied spaces shape our experience of atmosphere, memory, and place. Rather than depicting architecture directly, her paintings consider how spatial structures are sensed through light, reflection, rhythm, scale, and the subtle transitions between interior and exterior environments.

Inspired by the reflective surfaces of urban architecture, the geometry of the built environment, and the shifting atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest landscape, Wallace creates compositions that occupy a threshold between constructed and natural worlds. These spaces are intentionally open-ended. They suggest fragments of architectural plans, windows, corridors, horizons, and shifting planes, while resisting fixed interpretation. The work invites viewers to navigate spaces that feel both familiar and speculative, intimate and expansive.

Using a meticulous process of taping, layering, masking, and reworking paint, Wallace builds each painting gradually over time. The accumulation of marks reflects a process of construction, erasure, and revision that echoes the drawing and redrawing of an architectural plan. Through this sustained engagement with the surface, the paintings retain a visible sense of history and duration, revealing traces of earlier decisions beneath subsequent layers.

Central to Wallace's practice is an interest in the transcendent potential of painting and in the capacity of abstraction to evoke emotional and psychological space. The repetitive nature of her process becomes a meditative act, allowing atmosphere to emerge slowly through colour, light, and spatial tension. Her paintings offer spaces of contemplation and reprieve, where the boundaries between architecture, landscape, memory, and imagination remain fluid.