Une chose quasi distante / An Almost Distant Thing
Patel Brown Gallery, Montréal, Québec
Group show with Émilie Allard, B. Brookbank, Maya Fuhr, Karen Kraven, Maddie McNeely, Alberto Porro
June 6th to July 6th, 2024
Curated by Joséphine Rivard and Roxanne Arsenault
Documentation by Jean-Michael Seminaro
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Some things we have only as long as they remain lost,
some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
Rebecca Solnit
Une chose quasi distante / An Almost Distant Thing brings together different works around the idea of the fragment, collecting, and contemplation. In the eloquent absence of closeness, in the gathering of memories, and in selected observations of the incomplete and the notional, the six artists in this exhibition offer a few examples of their winding, desired, and subjective reality.
What is our relationship to desire, to the absence of what is wanted? Rebecca Solnit states that we often treat the unattainable like a problem that needs to be solved instead of dwelling in the richness of longing, which is inherent to being human. Sometimes, just a fragment is enough for our mind to reach the coveted object, or even to become lost in its infinite possibilities.
Karen Kraven underlines the absence of things through the negative space of fabric offcuts and remnants. Through the artist’s hands, textile scraps deemed of little to no value still have the ability to redefine a presence, to reconstruct the feeling of a memory. Like a ragpicker collecting unwanted fabric, Kraven uses these accumulations to build a family memory linked to her parents’ history in the garment industry.
In the centre of Alberto Porro’s paintings, Italian playing cards are juxtaposed against vaguely familiar backgrounds. Decontextualized in this way, the cards appear as omens, like recognized yet cryptic clues that speculate on a prosperous future or the next step to take. By depicting only one symbol per painting, Porro values the fragmentary; by abandoning the idea of wholeness, the preciosity of incompleteness can emerge. In homage to his Italian ancestry, Porro reveals his collector side and finds a way to reconnect with his identity through the game of Scopa.
Émilie Allard collects various found materials. Unexpected discoveries, interspersed with formal reinterpretations, create works that suggest rituals from the past or in the making. Dried and preserved flowers, podalic artifacts, silent labyrinthian wind instruments; Allard’s works are materially present while also containing uncertain possibility and ambivalent hypotheses. Under the aura of intrigue and contemplation, her pieces allow our thoughts to digress.
Maddie McNeely’s sculptures draw from different contexts and references, such as furniture, plant food, and containers. And like all natural materials, carved wood is highly evocative, both for its utility and its potential. In this arrangement of familiar objects, McNeely organizes our perception in physical space. Columns of varying heights might impede our movements, but they also evoke the protection and security that posts and railings typically provide. In this way, McNeely explores domestic codes while gently and subtly raising deeper environmental questions.
The enigmatic presence of Maya Fuhr’s photographs consider head-on the intimacy that can exist in absence and erasure. Although her images seem to shut us out, her cardboard cutouts of stereotypical bodies possess an anonymous quality that allows the viewer to project themselves onto their blank surfaces. Framed within dark and muted environments, like a waiting room or backstage, they become receptacles for feelings and sensations.
B. Brookbank uses the photographic gaze and frame to define the sensitive nature of contemplation. While a window usually allows the gaze to project into the distance, here it becomes an impressionistic space to commemorate loss and absence. The resulting vision becomes partial, fragmented and vulnerable, but charged with vitality. The cardboard and felt marker lines act as a response to sadness, an added presence to counter the act of erasure.
Each of these works acts as a vast and incomplete narrative; practices overlap, revealing materials and images that act as memories, absences, and sensations. Their processes of extraction and collage act as ways to materialize multiple realities and to foreground the indescribable, both personal and universal.
Text by Joséphine Rivard and Roxanne Arsenault (translation by Jo-Anne Balcaean)
Une chose quasi distante / An Almost Distant Thing
Patel Brown Gallery, Montréal, Québec
Group show with Émilie Allard, B. Brookbank, Maya Fuhr, Karen Kraven, Maddie McNeely, Alberto Porro
June 6th to July 6th, 2024
Curated by Joséphine Rivard and Roxanne Arsenault
Documentation by Jean-Michael Seminaro
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost,
some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
Rebecca Solnit
Une chose quasi distante / An Almost Distant Thing brings together different works around the idea of the fragment, collecting, and contemplation. In the eloquent absence of closeness, in the gathering of memories, and in selected observations of the incomplete and the notional, the six artists in this exhibition offer a few examples of their winding, desired, and subjective reality.
What is our relationship to desire, to the absence of what is wanted? Rebecca Solnit states that we often treat the unattainable like a problem that needs to be solved instead of dwelling in the richness of longing, which is inherent to being human. Sometimes, just a fragment is enough for our mind to reach the coveted object, or even to become lost in its infinite possibilities.
Karen Kraven underlines the absence of things through the negative space of fabric offcuts and remnants. Through the artist’s hands, textile scraps deemed of little to no value still have the ability to redefine a presence, to reconstruct the feeling of a memory. Like a ragpicker collecting unwanted fabric, Kraven uses these accumulations to build a family memory linked to her parents’ history in the garment industry.
In the centre of Alberto Porro’s paintings, Italian playing cards are juxtaposed against vaguely familiar backgrounds. Decontextualized in this way, the cards appear as omens, like recognized yet cryptic clues that speculate on a prosperous future or the next step to take. By depicting only one symbol per painting, Porro values the fragmentary; by abandoning the idea of wholeness, the preciosity of incompleteness can emerge. In homage to his Italian ancestry, Porro reveals his collector side and finds a way to reconnect with his identity through the game of Scopa.
Émilie Allard collects various found materials. Unexpected discoveries, interspersed with formal reinterpretations, create works that suggest rituals from the past or in the making. Dried and preserved flowers, podalic artifacts, silent labyrinthian wind instruments; Allard’s works are materially present while also containing uncertain possibility and ambivalent hypotheses. Under the aura of intrigue and contemplation, her pieces allow our thoughts to digress.
Maddie McNeely’s sculptures draw from different contexts and references, such as furniture, plant food, and containers. And like all natural materials, carved wood is highly evocative, both for its utility and its potential. In this arrangement of familiar objects, McNeely organizes our perception in physical space. Columns of varying heights might impede our movements, but they also evoke the protection and security that posts and railings typically provide. In this way, McNeely explores domestic codes while gently and subtly raising deeper environmental questions.
The enigmatic presence of Maya Fuhr’s photographs consider head-on the intimacy that can exist in absence and erasure. Although her images seem to shut us out, her cardboard cutouts of stereotypical bodies possess an anonymous quality that allows the viewer to project themselves onto their blank surfaces. Framed within dark and muted environments, like a waiting room or backstage, they become receptacles for feelings and sensations.
B. Brookbank uses the photographic gaze and frame to define the sensitive nature of contemplation. While a window usually allows the gaze to project into the distance, here it becomes an impressionistic space to commemorate loss and absence. The resulting vision becomes partial, fragmented and vulnerable, but charged with vitality. The cardboard and felt marker lines act as a response to sadness, an added presence to counter the act of erasure.
Each of these works acts as a vast and incomplete narrative; practices overlap, revealing materials and images that act as memories, absences, and sensations. Their processes of extraction and collage act as ways to materialize multiple realities and to foreground the indescribable, both personal and universal.
— Joséphine Rivard and Roxanne Arsenault (translation by Jo-Anne Balcaean)