Catherine Bolduc presents work from two collections, “L’or des Fous” and “Vancouver Island Project”:
“The three works on paper entitled Fool’s Gold 1, 2 and 3 are digital prints enhanced with watercolor and nail polish. The image printed on each of them is a close-up photograph of a specimen of pyrite, a mineral often called “fool’s gold” because of its golden color and metallic luster. Through the intervention of an exuberant watercolor drawing across the entire surface of the paper, the small piece of pyrite sometimes mistaken for gold takes on the dimension of a vast landscape. And in this vast, artificial and luxuriant landscape, golden nail polish like “fool’s gold” drips from volcanic craters and rolling mountains composed of mauve and ultramarine-blue strands of hair that tangle and weave together. The complexity of the whole suggests a territory that is more psychic than physical, where desires and reality merge and where illusions hold sway.”
“During an artist residency at the Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island, I GPS-recorded the routes of my hikes at different sites across the island. I reproduced these routes with masking fluid on paper to preserve the path in white in the final composition. During my hikes, I tried to focus all my attention on observing my immediate surroundings, while allowing memories to emerge and letting myself be carried away by the reverie of the present moment. My intention with this project was to translate through drawing a psychic and physical experience of the landscape, rather than a visual experience as dictated by the tradition of landscape painting. At the same time, I became interested in neuroscience research studying the process by which the brain interprets the space through which a person moves to navigate it, somewhat like an internal GPS, but also through memory. I freely incorporated patterns into the drawings that evoke the neural connections formed during a hike.”
-Catherine
Annie Baillargeon’s pieces are dreamlike and wild:
“The series Les floraisons des mauvaises semences : les cendres des épouses de l’ascèse (The blossoming of bad seeds: the ashes of ascetic wives) portrays an impetuous mutation through narrative scenes that are both dreamlike and wild. Working from her religious upbringing, Annie Baillargeon uses autofictional processes to invoke rituals imbued with the power to live and resist. As performative compositions, these rites are part of a desire to liberate bodies from asceticism and its psychic, social and environmental ravages. The rituals of care and collective filiation adopt a pastoral imagery in which a multiplicity of rebellious, pagan and seditious figures reconnect with fire, water, air and earth as a means of reclaiming their own bodies. They reclaim what they share with each other and with the rest of the living world. Painting by painting, links are forged and the story of a cohabitation is woven.
Neither fairy tales nor the way of the cross, these night owls criss-cross obscure spaces. They trust in the invisible and the incalculable. These twilight environments, with no overhanging light, give rise to singular lights, whether fragile candles or blazing braziers, around which a community forms. The flame of each individual takes part in and feeds the collective flame. It breathes into it and enlivens it. Together, they form the part of the fire that remains after the denial of life. A desire to reconnect with what we’ve been separated from, and to heal from dispossession, carries this series; the healing that begins here is creative, calling on the ability to believe in this world, that of bodies, the earth and attachments to the living. What burns grows back, but in a different way.
Asceticism is a discipline that seeks to liberate the spirit through contempt for the body and spiritual or moral perfection. It disciplines the ungodly body, reducing its sensitivity and restraining its passions in order to turn it towards transcendence and away from earthly life. Ashamed of the muddy, nourishing earth, it marks out, disqualifies and even denies the abundance and eruption of life. It erases the body while capturing life, placing them at the service of a system for managing life and death. On the other hand, blooms name the body’s symbiosis with the earth’s elements, from which life emerges. They evoke cyclical processes of transformation and rebirth. To blossom is to resist death and to experience its interdependence as a responsibility and a strength. Between ashes and seeds, the bad seeds are not always the ones we think they are.”
- Annie
Amy Dryer’s work references Homer’s Odyssey and the journey home:
Amy Dryer’s ‘Coming Home to You’ is a series in the language of abstract expressionism where colour is laid on with strong contrasts, inspired by the familiar costal landscapes of Victoria, BC. Each painting is built the same way: a white sailboat sits at the base of the canvas, small and clearly painted, and above it opens a vast and vivid night sky.
The series takes its bearings from Homer’s Odyssey. The sky stands for the uncharted, greater world of risk and adventure whereas the boat implies the return through the signification of the vessel that carries the traveller home after the expedition is over. Across the three paintings, the same relationship between stability and exploration is examined. Thus, the title of this series is derived from this notion of adventure and return.
