Erica Mendritzki is finishing her MFA at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Germany and the UK. I spoke to her over gchat about her thesis project, a suite of four paintings titled “On Posing,” which I learned about when she presented them recently at a weekend of artist’s talks hosted by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. – Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: First of all, what are we seeing here?

ERICA MENDRITZKI: These are four paintings that started with the idea of making a picture of a photographer’s backdrop—the kind you might find in a yearbook photo, or in a family portrait taken at Sears.

BLVR: How did the idea come to you?

EM: I honestly don’t know—as an idea, it suddenly appeared, I think while I was eating lunch at school! I remember asking my friend if she thought it sounded like it was a good idea, and she said, “yes? I don’t know?” which was basically good enough for me.

BLVR: What did you ask her? “Should I make pictures of backdrops?”

EM: Yes. I think I said, “What if I made a painting of a backdrop, like in a yearbook photo?” I was attracted to the idea that it would look like an abstract painting, but that it would sort of secretly be depicting something. At first there was just one of them.

BLVR: How did there come to be four?

EM: I made the first one, but I wasn’t totally happy with how it turned out, so then I made another one, and I liked how the two of them interacted. But they were different sizes, and both were too small, so I decided to make four more that were a little larger. Four seemed like the right number—it’s so stable. Two becomes about doubling; three is hierarchical; but four is just enough to suggest “many” or “multiple.”

BLVR: And the blue… do backdrops tend to be blue?

EM: They come in lots of colours, but blue is probably the most common… or at least it was when I was getting school pictures taken! I think that this particular kind of backdrop is starting to become nostalgic. From what I can tell, studio photographers now tend to favour solid black or white in the background, rather than the mottled effect of the hand-painted blue that I’m referencing. But that kind of backdrop isn’t totally obsolete yet—I still see it turning up occasionally when some of my friends post professional family portraits on...