Cara Guri
Home: Surrey, British Columbia
Title: Absent Presence
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 153 x 195 cm
Website: caraguri.com
Instagram: @cara.guri
ARTIST STATEMENT
The body is a landscape: one that is simultaneously known and unknown to us. Each mark, freckle, peak, and valley written on our skin chronicles our history, experience, and story and evolves with us over time. We are a narrative continuum of our lived experiences and our skin bears witness to that. Each cell in the body replaces itself in its own timeframe, resulting in every person having a mostly new set of cells within 7-10 years: what does this mean for the continuous experience of self? This painting is about a lot of things for me: both states of body but also states of mind. I wanted to explore that sensation of existing in one’s own internal space at the same time as being present in the broader world knowing oneself to be perceived while also not fully perceptible. Through this work I played with the concept of the self slipping away from itself, and more specifically how that the sensation of creating a self-portrait is like chasing oneself across time.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Cara Guri is a professional visual artist and musician of Catalan and Danish descent. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and has completed a painting residency at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Scholarship, the Brissenden Scholarship, the Bishop’s Undergraduate Prize in Fine Arts and most recently the CICA Vancouver x Jelina Couture International Art Awards 2025 Beacon Award. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include CICA Vancouver, The ACT, The Reach Gallery Museum, Burrard Arts Foundation and Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. She has also completed artist residencies with hcma, Burrard Arts, The City of Abbotsford, North Vancouver Recreation and Culture and was an artist with Vancouver Mural Festival. She lives and works in Vancouver BC. In her current painting practice, she explores the relationship between identity construction and portraiture, the boundary between the seen and unseen and the messy line between literal space and psychological space.