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In characteristic style, the gallery space in Projet Pangée for this show is filled by a series of paintings complemented by a few sculptures produced by another artist. This time they had a figurative painter who is a formalist in Delphine Hennelly, and an abstract sculptor enamoured with magic and the subconscious in Mickey MacKenna. Both are a little mythical in choice of subject, riffing off of art history (early modernism and minimalism, respectively) and both artists work with line and stylized forms in distinctive ways, possessing also a dynamic, developing practise which is of keen interest.

It is difficult these days to paint something in a style that seems at once innovative and genuine, but Delphine Hennelly has achieved that with these strong paintings. Hennelly’s works are primarily formalist paintings interrupted by figuration, or figurative works interrupted by formalism. This body of work, in which all but one painting consists of figures painted over with mostly horizontal lines, was inspired by tapestries. Hennelly recently obtained her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts in Rutgers, New Jersey, and her BFA in 2002 from Cooper Union. She was born in Vancouver to parents who produced and acted in their own theatre productions and spent her childhood in an artistic milieu surrounded the shapes, forms, and garments of theatre production. It seems apparent that this mixture of creativity with the formal structure of family was formative to her. After that, Hennelly spent some years of her youth in Montreal, and is now residing in the United States.

Delphine Hennelly is a self-professed formalist. She has an interest in colour theory, and her colour choices are unusual, pinks, greens and browns abound, not usually the most compelling when seen together, as the combination is reminiscent of 60s fabrics and decor, but here they work with great luminosity and resonance. The unexpected colour choices and juxtapositions are highly satisfying. Speaking of being sated, the layers of these paintings were referred to on Pangée’s Instagram as “cake” and indeed they do seem moist and edible. Although they are painted without impasto, they are lush and generous and the visual placement does call to mind a multilayered cake. Hennelly cleverly combines her colours, the flavours of various styles, iconic imagery and decorative motifs.

Hennelly is an omnivore artist, gobbling up textiles, ceramics, British political cartoons, the French school of early modernism, and so on. By chance, while looking at another exhibition, she found a way to apply the construction of a tapestry to the construction of a painting. In these works, her competent hand weaves figuration and colour into the warp and woof of the canvas. She begins with the figures, then clean lines, then messes them up, or “wears” them, to capture the look of aged tapestries and their worn out threads. At other times she begins with the structure of the lines. Beyond these line-centric paintings, Hennelly has a strong sense of line in the sense that drawing seems facile to her, and she performs it without much modelling. I was surprised and intrigued to learn about the pace and timing of her process. She takes one to two days to select the colours of her painting, and can take as little as couple of days to a week or two to complete the painting itself.  Many of the images selected to sit behind the lines of these paintings are inspired either formally or thematically by classical drawing and sculpture. Yet, she isn’t afraid to use decorative elements which could adorn plates, children’s books, or fill the comic section of a common newspaper. Also apparent is her interest in feminist theory and the representation of women. Hennelly has spoken about the shift in her work to representing women with a consciousness of equality, rather than as objects to be looked at and desired. By utilizing fine art and the decorative and textile arts with equal focus for her inspiration, Hennelly levels the playing field and seems to take the stance that one is not superior to the other. Her older work explores femininity, what it is to be a woman, sensuality, and the body. Hennelly also deals with motherhood, protection, new life, maturity, different phases of life, and heavy topics such as the suffering of refugees, mass migration and world crises. There aren’t answers being provided here, rather there are questions presented upon which we can ruminate in the form of visual meditation on her canvases. 

The figures which you can see, more or less, by peering through the haze and maze of lines, are mother and child, the child in pink, which appears to be the protagonist of the series. Storytelling takes a backseat in these paintings, which don’t come off very figuratively, and even less autobiographically, rather they are inventive and exploratory. Hennelly is a sensitive artist whose works are often inspired by current events, social justice and the suffering of humanity, and while these themes seem to be part of what gets her in the studio, what keeps her there are the formal problems of painting. She is also interested in what lies behind and ahead in terms of art history and contemporary painting. She is an artist who is always pushing herself, experimenting, questioning, puzzling, exploring.

Memories of a Haecceity, shown in the gallery space literally in opposition to all her other works, is an example of her previous style before being intercepted by the lines and geometric forms which the viewer is compelled to see through, but sort of denied. We see a mother and child in simplified, stylized forms with shades of the classical and the illustrative. The mother holds a shaft of wheat and the pair seem to be climbing over a pile of boulders in a desert landscape with a sunny, partly cloudy sky. Haecceity is from the Latin haecceitas, a term from medieval scholastic philosophy. Haecceity is a person’s or object’s thisness, or particularity. The choice in titles is unusual since the imagery chosen doesn’t have a particularity, or a “thisness”, but the paintings do.

The Infant Praxiteles again shows a mother and child, and this one very tapestry-like as the lines are horizontal and not interrupted with other patterns. Praxiteles was a Greek sculptor who was credited with being the first person to sculpt a life-sized statue of a nude woman.  With its classical theme, strictly horizontal structure, and the title, I think of lineage, artistic and human. I think of how we pass down images throughout history, of influencers and influenced. I think of how objects like tapestries are passed down, and how we pass down our genetics, our ideas.

There is an intense repetition of motifs and even very particular images throughout Hennelly’s oeuvre. There is a sense of annihilation of meaning in this aggressive repetition, which could almost be likened to the practice of psychotherapy where one becomes desensitized to difficult topics by constant exposure.  The overarching theme of the exhibition is that of the mother and child. There is a sense of idealizing this familial relationship through classical, pagan means, and Hennelly has spoken about trying to get away from Christian ideology and imagery when painting such subjects. She often uses repetition in her work as a way of breaking down and exhausting an image.  Her tendency to over-produce one motif over and over recalls the mass production of advertising and posters, cue Andy Warhol. She destroys the image until all meaning is almost stripped away and we are left with the forms. 

The Matrix paintings I found almost impossible to decipher. With some difficulty I could make out the pink of a baby’s legs and some foliage at the top of the painting, perhaps a maternal figure sheltering the child, and some rocks. The composition vaguely recalls Renaissance art. The etymology of the word matrix is complex and fascinating. Stemming from mater, or mother, matrix literally means “breeding female” in Latin. It came to mean “womb” in late Middle English as well. The word effectively plays off its mathematical or formal meanings in modern use, where a matrix is “a rectangular array of quantities or expressions in rows and columns that is treated as a single entity and manipulated according to particular rules”, or structurally: “an organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication may run through the same individual”, according to the Oxford English dictionary. Perhaps the structure, the DNA foundation, the whole becomes more important than the individual here.

The typically horizontal lines that we view the figures through in these paintings call to mind digitization, as when looking through fuzzy, moving lines at a channel you aren’t subscribed to, giving the viewer a voyeuristic sensation as we struggle with our perception and desire to recognize forms. There’s a sense of the figures being imprisoned too, and bound to the surface. There’s a flatness to Delphine Hennelly’s work which lends it a perhaps stronger relationship to the abstract than one would assume, certainly more so than in her previous work. Her older work, lovely formally, is quite flat, very posterized in appearance with its uniform colours reminiscent of old advertisements in their simplicity. I like that she is engaged in a dynamic exploration, not keeping all the lines horizontal, experimenting with adding shapes as in The Matrix 1, Untitled and The Matrix 2, with their circles and triangles and squares further thwarting a figurative read. I particularly enjoyed Venus and Cupid for, admittedly, the easier interpretation of  the scene behind the jittering lines of the bars of paint, and how the pink eye of Cupid peers through, as if between apartment blinds. All in all, Delphine Hennelly is a challenging, inventive artist who is well-deserving of the mounting attention being paid to her work.

Although Mickey MacKenna, when first encountering her sculptures, seems to work exclusively formally, her pieces are self-portraits. Her process is poetic, imaginative and exploratory. She is a young Toronto artist who recently graduated from OCAD University with a BFA in sculpture, and she commences her MFA at the Royal College of Art in London this year; her career is taking early traction.

In Last You Saw Me, the perpendicular assembly of this wall piece is striking with its combination of a thin horizontal steel bar and soft organic material to be found in the sea sponge at each end, reminiscent of a crucifixion. By their placement and shape, the sponges are like helpless hands, waiting to receive, to soak, to grab. They are held mercilessly apart by the bar of steel, while the body (or twine with its clinging chamomile flowers from the tower of Bollingen of Jung) dangles down in resignation. The sponge absorbs what it can, what it must, in this case, the gutter water of Toronto. We are met with the high and low here, the delicate and the relentless, the natural and the man-made. As earthly beings we take in everything from our environment, from the base pollution of our corrupt surroundings to the flowers which bloom perennially, reminding us those who inspire and motivate us.

I was told by the director of Projet Pangée that the tall yellow standing piece, entitled Favia Blumen—made of wood, specifically plywood and driftwood, along with a wasp nest, chamomile flowers, sage and thyme from the tower of Bollingen of Jung, crushed seashells, and acrylic paint and varnish—represents the artist’s ego when feeling confident. I love the mix of playfulness and seriousness that is apparent upon delving in MacKenna’s work. Yellow is the colour of the solar plexus, the seat of the ego-self. The egg yolk yellow piece stands like a cartoon cutout, or one of those two-dimensional representations made out of cardboard of celebrities. A splat-shaped stand supports the piece which rises like a stem and then splits off in two stamens, topped at the throat of the taller section by the wasp nest which is dotted with herbs. It could be a parent and child, or a figure divided in two, or a plant reaching for the sun and reflecting that radiance in its own yolky glow. The imagined buzzing of the wasp nest suggests voice and even aggression, and the shorter protrusion, if seen as part of a singular figure, could be a little phallic. Thus, this sculpture does give a successful impression of self-satisfaction and happy egotism along with a bit of cockiness. Of course, once you know the title it sort of gives it away in that favia is a kind of coral and Blumen is German for flowers. It definitely looks like it could be part of a coral reef but knowing this piece is autobiographical is certainly more evocative.

MacKenna’s more low-sitting floor piece which could be mistaken for an end stand; The Fish that Caught the Hague is a piece of alabaster resting on a small table of lovely burned ash wood. I enjoyed the seemingly worn-down lines of wood, the way it looked gently and carefully burnt, the contrast of the moon-like alabaster, the richness of the wood-brown, and the way the edges of the alabaster were softened to suggest a skull. The title seems absurdist, a bit Dada, I couldn’t draw much in way of an analogy, but it sparked some curiosity and played up the absurdist quality of the piece itself, in that it was presented as an ordinary object or something that may be around the house, but it certainly isn’t. 

Nights with the Wild Boar is a standing, or rather, walking, sculpture made of driftwood, plywood and acrylic paint. It was motivated by MacKenna’s trip to the Black Forest. 

This gumby-legged piece in a sort of olive-ochre has a head that bites from its foot like a snapping turtle, and a hollow inner core, like a Dali figure. As in Favia Blumen, this figure is narrow and flat when seen from one perspective, and then comes to life when seen from the other perspective, much like a streamlined, less human Giacometti. Just going by the appearance of this sculpture and the title, you can sense its menace, mystery and determination. MacKenna constructs her sculptures as self-portraits and has an interest in Jung; we can read her works as pieces of herself, fragments which comprise a whole. It would be interesting one day to see many of them gathered together in a retrospective, forming a unity of Self in projection. In her solitary travels to the Black Forest, MacKenna had some profound experiences which she shared with me. I think it would be most fruitful to hear it in her own words: 

“My time in the Black Forest was an important part of a trip I took alone through Europe last fall. I stayed in Gengenbach which is a small and strange historic town nestled in a valley of the forest. Looking back on that time is a thicketed phantasmagoric montage. It was a time of psychological purging on all fronts and I’m grateful for the cosmic brew I had to swim my way out of. I spent my days running, meditating, writing and reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections which is a retelling of his life from his earliest memories. At night I had vivid dreams bordering on night terrors and panicked fevers unlike anything I’ve experienced. It was a rebirth of some sort. The sculpture Nights With The Wild Boar (2018) is a portrait of that time. I found out weeks after I left Gengenbach that the Black Forest is known for its healing properties and many rehabilitation and retreat centers are hidden throughout. Wild boars run through the forest and are responsible for a handful of human deaths each year. Many believe the Black Forest is home to fairies, gnomes and spirits. 

After my time in Gengenbach I took a job in Switzerland in the farm country outside of Zürich. All of these disparate elements came together so swiftly and sweetly. I continued reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections as I found myself wandering the streets of Zürich and Basel in stride with Jung’s recollections of his life in these exact places. I felt a strong need to at least be near the Bollingen Tower and specifically the stone carvings. On a day off I drove to Bollingen which consists of a playground, a four car parking lot and a few large houses on the lake. The tower is unmarked and not open to the public but it was a cold and rainy Tuesday in November and I recognized a turret through the thick trees surrounding the property. With wind at my back that felt as though it was Jung himself I jumped the fence, then the stone wall, skinny dipped in the lake and meditated with my back upon the stone cube he carved. I can barely describe it. It was the most magical day of my life!” 

Mackenna relates to substance in a sort of magical way, much like the ritual art we call fetishes, or how a shaman works with objects and plant medicine to cause them to relate to meaning in a way that connects matter to the astral planes, bringing healing and insight. She imbues her materials with power, meaning and revelatory identity but also sensitively works with them to draw out and highlight their own innate significance and character. Her work is magical in the sense that its creation is in tune with the mysterious, transformative process known as life, which is deeply connected to art-making itself. Magic is perhaps only something we do not yet understand, but its mystery fills us with awe and humility. Mickey MacKenna’s work reminds us of the energy we imbue in objects, and the energy inherent in matter/physical existence itself.

Anjuli Rathod and Vanessa Brown are emerging artists whose work interplays oneirically in The Far Off Blue Places at Projet Pangée, where the viewer becomes a shadow character from the works themselves, walking among pieces rendered alternately in two and three dimensions. Both artists present strong, whimsical, dreamy work that one can return to again and again to discover new elements and interpretations. The imagery and colour in these paintings and sculptures rhymes and riffs in a harmonious manner without feeling forced. The works in this exhibit are markedly influenced by surrealism yet also brings in contemporary concerns and display a love of materials as well as the symbolic.

Anjuli Rathod is a young painter from Queens, New York, who has been making sophisticated paintings for such a young artist. Her works in this show are acrylic and flashe, a vinyl-based, matte, opaque material. She possesses an elegant and variegated visual vocabulary, gleaned from sessions of automatic drawing. The themes function like elements of recurring dreams you try to piece together upon waking, but which resist logic and linearity. These paintings also often feel like playful clues in a hallucinogenic mystery story, strongly featuring elements such as keys, question marks, footprints, locks, notes, and knives. There are nods to surrealism in Rathodâ€s work, and you can also feel a subtle influence from such painters as Chagall and Guston. Her colours, saturated but not hyper-saturated, form a largely primary palette, muted by the thinness of the paint. There is a marked dominance of royal blue and softened electric blue.  You can tell early on that Rathod’s practice has a foundation in water-based media, and recognize her strength in drawing; not in the way of a conventionally exceptional draughtsperson, rather in her confidence of exploration. There is an awareness of uncertainty, but also a drive to push on. The movement of brushwork in this series looks windswept, always from left to right, a west wind, perhaps warm.

There is a pervasive sense of mystery to these works. Her stream of consciousness leads us on as if we are in a game of Clue. What has happened? A crime? A surreptitious romance? What secrets are kept and which revealed? Footsteps become question marks. Beyond the somnambulic imagery and process-based, intuitive approach taken from the surrealists, Rathodâ€s motif of the hole or well is reminiscent of Daliâ€s voids. Encountering serpents, candles, knives, shells, ropes, question marks and spiders, we are reminded of our forgotten dreams which fill us with a sense of déjà-vu. We are brought into a realm of fear, anxiety, wonder, and hope, a world rife with desire and uncertainty. One of the most noticeable presences in these paintings are the grasping, clawed, demonic hands and cartoon footprints, which conjure thoughts of the way we make and the way we go. Here is life as a journey or a mystery, a puzzle to be solved and concurrently, the sense of allowing it to be so.

Compared to Rathodâ€s older work, this series offers some new developments. She continues to invoke surrealism with the collage style and dreamy imagery which evades direct interpretation. However, the new paintings have a different, blue-focused palette, they are more harmonious and uniform in their use of space, while remaining inventive in the use of form. The artist works with specific imagery in each series but allows old elements to leak in.

Getting specific, Blue Shell Well features a spider which resembles an electric current travelling between two mask-like faces which are also giant pennies. A conch shell graces the foreground, and the terrain bears faded footprints you could almost miss. A butter-coloured high-heeled hoof descends, with a serpent behind. We see a hole with a rope in it, which reads like a void in the fabric of the nocturnal landscape, simultaneously muscled and made of fabric. Considering the title, this hole is clearly a simplified well. Despite being omnipresent mythologically, particularly in the Old Testament, wells are paradoxically sources of life-giving water and also present life-endangering risk, of drowning or poisoning. In Night Scene there is the spider, upside-down this time, crawling between two stage-like red curtains, with its comrade behind. With the knife floating apart from the grasping hands we are given a sense of wanting, grasping, desire and fear intermingled. Shadow and light stand apart in sharp contrast. The repeated image of the conch shell, worn by the sea snail, appears again here and pervades this body of work. Besides bearing a beautiful spiral shape, the conch is richly textured with points on the outside, and silky smooth like skin or porcelain on the interior. The conch is a important symbol and presence in Hindu mythology, for initiating a ritual auspiciously with a haunting om-like bellow, it is redolent of beginnings and purity.

On a table in Waiting is the ubiquitous, patient spider and carrots which float off to the top of the canvas. The carrot is a returning theme from Rathodâ€s older work, perhaps symbolic of desire, motivation or temptation. Behind the table is a large, inverted head with closed eyes, and behind that, a thin veil and a silhouette of a woman illuminated in the doorframe. In What Fires, a Burning Room there are footprints which turn into question marks, a large key, and a lock framed by a patchwork of colours and legs. Are they walking away, or ascending to some higher dimension? One resembles an X-ray, you can see its bones. It is as if a voice is saying, look harder, look inside. Hatch has a strong use of shadow against grey stone, cut-out shapes like paper with shadows of window panes with spiders crawling across them. These rocks are presented before a green screen, tears in the fabric of reality? A Place Called Home, my favourite of this series, shows a destabilized room, upheaved as if by earthquake, a humble table with a conch atop it. Two snakes intertwine and ascend, triggering thoughts of kundalini, the sacred energy that travels up the spine during samadhi or spiritual union, but they could also be interpreted as a caduceus in the way they are joined together.  A switched-off fan rests on the table, the night feels cool and blue. A beam of light thick enough to touch illuminates a pile of discarded socks that a ghoulish hand is reaching for.  Pennies proliferate, a thing that has value but is practically worthless. Perhaps this is the artistâ€s studio at night, as a box, table or wall unfolds itself with a white blank expanse on it, of canvas or paper. A crescent moon looks on from the window.

Vanessa Brown is a Vancouver-based sculptor who has shown throughout North America and abroad. Her seemingly delicate painted cut-steel objects in this show are sometimes reminiscent of still-lives or pop-up books, while others stand against walls as a sort of totem pole or staff of power at rest. The still life works are made from a few pieces of painted steel which fit together at angles, giving them a dimensionality that varies widely depending on which direction they are viewed from and the light available. There are sometimes cut-out shapes and bends to the pieces, and they are afterward painted in a loose manner. These sculptures have a deceptive, playful delicacy to their appearance which belies their tough nature. Their rough-hewn fragility reminded me of feminine strength. A dreamlike mix of figurative elements plays between two and three dimensions in these works.

Cosmic Screen is a blue and black piece, whose title suggests the projection of reality and how reality descends dimensionally. The artwork’s title jives with its materiality and construction, as do the other pedestal-standing works, by turning flatness into three dimensions. It is a still life, and as such, it functions as an object of meditation by making us recall how life is stilled in death. The indigo screen conjures a priestâ€s confessional or a trip to Morocco, yet it is shaped like a mountain softened by time. A hand reaches for a bottle, but is it poison or potion? There is a distinct sense of the magical, the alchemistâ€s hand as the artistâ€s. Hands are a recurring theme for Brown. Her 2016 solo show, The Hand of Camille, presented recently in Vancouver, deals inventively with Camille Claudel, lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. We are also reminded of the famous Dada symbol of the pointing typographical hand, but here it is the gently grasping hand, also disembodied.

Thermochrome Steel is an object of pink and purple painted shapes. Dripping white dots form a polka dot pattern, the only bar or dash melts into drips and becomes a chalky crutch. Sun Milk is made of exquisitely delicate-looking white layers which look like paper but have the strength of steel.The artwork’s gorgeous play of light and shadow features numerous shades of white and grey depending on the way it is lit. Newspaper in Flight, a bold and stark work, is reminiscent of a Franz Kline painting with its aggressive, feathered brushstrokes of black on white.

Attic Light could be a totem pole of dream imagery, or a magicianâ€s staff. It bears an orange, a hand, a window, a candle, a cloud and a fishhook.  Another staff sculpture, Breakups, has smoking lips, the moon, a boot, a French manicured fingernail, a martini glass and an upside-down plant. Are these memories of a relationship? Or ways to cope with separation? Perhaps they are objects returned or overturned, thrown about. He is given the boot, and solace is taken in a book, a new lipstick, and a martini.

Vanessa Brownâ€s works here in The Far Away Blue Places feel like added clues in Anjuli Rathodâ€s paintings. Or part of Rathodâ€s paintings that got away, came to life, and populated the space, yet they also stand on their own as sophisticated works of abstraction in the strength of their form and sense of playfulness and paradox.

« Je me demande comment honorer le travail à lâ€atelier à une époque dâ€hyper-connectivité et de vitesse. Lâ€atelier nâ€est pas un espace acquis, trop souvent il persiste à nâ€Ãªtre quâ€un lieu précaire… Le travail est plus mobile, par les résidences de création, plus fluide, par les réalisations in situ. Pourtant la pratique dâ€atelier idéale demeure encore pour moi un espace sacré de concentration, un lieu de silence, voire dâ€extraction du monde autant quâ€un espace de rituels. Jâ€ai ce désir de mettre à nu ces idées, comprenant les failles potentielles du processus, les moments dâ€hésitations… par lâ€incarnation du travail dans le corps et lâ€espace réel, imaginaire et symbolique ».

— Barbara Claus

Dans son plus récent projet in situ, Petites incarnations (suite), actuellement présenté au Centre des arts actuels Skol depuis le 6 mars, lâ€artiste montréalaise, Barbara Claus, travaille à même lâ€espace.

Au moyen dâ€une dimension performative indirecte et dâ€une instigation du lieu dâ€exposition, son processus demeure éminemment intime, voire réservé et privé. Lorsquâ€aucun visiteur nâ€est dans la salle, elle intervient et quand un visiteur arrive, elle sâ€arrête et lâ€invite à enlever ses chaussures afin de le laisser entrer dans son « atelier ». Dâ€un voyage au Japon, Claus rapporte des coutumes culturelles et des influences diversifiées. La tradition japonaise veut que lâ€on se déchausse lorsque lâ€on entre dans un domicile, que ce soit chez soi ou chez quelquâ€un dâ€autre. Cette coutume ne se borne dâ€ailleurs pas quâ€aux maisons et aux appartements, mais également à certains endroits publics, tels les musées et les galeries. En ce sens, deux possibilités sâ€offrent au visiteur : il peut soit retirer ses chaussures et entrer à lâ€intérieur de lâ€atelier immersif, soit sâ€assoir sur un banc afin de contempler le tout de lâ€extérieur. Une division brute et non terminée délimite lâ€espace sacré de concentration, ce lieu de « rituels ».

Lâ€espace devient monographique. Lâ€artiste lâ€habite, se lâ€approprie et le transfigure par des codes symboliques. Dans celui-ci, elle travaille le rôle de la lenteur dans un monde où tout semble accélérer. Barbara Claus aborde maints thèmes, tels que la mémoire, lâ€Ã©phémérité et la mort. Sâ€inscrivant dans un processus imbu dâ€hésitations, entre construction et destruction, les traces apparaissent au moyen de détournements comme lâ€accumulation et le retrait de matières dissemblables. Le résultat est précaire puisque rien nâ€est permanent ; tout est momentané et spontané. Lâ€artiste va à lâ€encontre de la pérennité et de la durabilité en travaillant à lâ€aboutissement de lâ€inabouti.

Dans la salle de Skol, quatre cloisons en perpétuelle évolution sâ€enchainent. Le mur initial — Monument I — est tapissé de minces feuilles dâ€aluminium superposées. Le mot « MORTE » y est creusé et parsemé de coruscations ; de distinctes réverbérations. La surface métallique reflète le mur parallèle — Monument II — qui est entièrement recouvert de cire dâ€abeille. Une succession de fines couches donne à la matière une couleur jaune saturé. Lâ€odeur de miel est omniprésente.

À lâ€opposé, par des Lignes de feu, Claus tente dâ€imiter la technique utilisée dans ses livres dâ€artiste : le découpage dâ€entailles délicates, ensuite brulées. Alors que chaque imperfection fait intégralement partie du processus, des lignes horizontales évident le plâtre de la cloison. Sur la paroi adjacente — La ruine —, lâ€artiste perfore dâ€innombrables petits trous et recouvre lâ€entièreté de la surface de graphite. Le mot « RUINE » sâ€y immisce, peint dâ€un ton spéculaire. Ainsi, la multitude des textures, par différentes étapes, contribue à lâ€Ã©tat transitoire que Claus offre au visiteur.

Le 22 avril prochain, dernier jour du projet, un finissage et un démantèlement collectif sont prévus. Chaque passant partira avec un élément de ce cadre dâ€extraction.

Lâ€Ã©volution du travail de lâ€artiste est disponible sur son site web.

The house plant possesses the cinematic ability to oscillate between the highly significant and the background prop. As a body of signification, the plant exists in relation to one individual: its caretaker. Even if a couple bought their asparagus fern together—taking turns carrying it on the walk home from the nursery, potting it on the first kitchen table that belonged to them and only them—only one half of the pair will remember to water it. It grows because of this individual, it makes it through the winter. As long as the fern is contained in a pot, in an apartment, in the middle of a city, its life is dependent. So the individual loves it, because he understands that it needs him. But the house plant can die, and the house plant is left behind, and the house plant is, of course, non-sentient.

The strange void that potted dracaena, fiddle leaf fig trees and philodendrons fill in our lives is explored by artists Evergon and Jean-Jacques Ringuette, with the exhibition HOUSEBOUND: Portraits from the Winter Garden, at Galerie Trois Points until April 22. The photographic works are an examination of interiority, reminiscence, and the beauty of the botany we keep.

A grid of 31 inkjet prints (3×10, plus one frame added to the top right corner) dominates the show. Brightly lit and placed in front of the same cool grey background, various potted plants sit for their portraits. One after the other, they are uniformly lined up like in an obligatory yearbook page for an aloof graduating class. They are a motley crew. “Margaret,” the bulbous and key lime green succulent, is slouching out of her tilted pot. “Echo”â€s pink petals cascade whimsically from a tall glass vase, like the girl from the wealthy family who doesnâ€t brush her hair. “Émilie” broods in a dark green tangle, at odds with the sunny yellow of the planter she crouches in. The camera captures the ridges of a vein, the glints of reflected light, and the vast negative space that respects each ‘lady-plant†as a subject. Within HOUSEBOUND, the exotic flora are yours for a moment. Without having to tend to their soil, it is possible to imagine complaining to “Margaret” about the morning rain or glancing in the hallway mirrorâ€s reflection of both you and “Echo” to check your teeth. You bring them the nourishment of the outside world; you are their caretaker. In return, they give you beautiful company.

Artist Evergon is also known as Celluloso Evergonni, Eve R. Gonzales and Egon Brut. The Canadian photographer is internationally acclaimed for his technological innovation (non-silver processes, electrostatic works and life-size holograms, for example) and thematic of sexuality, gender, aging and the body. A professor emeritus of studio arts at Concordia University, Evergon lives and works in Montreal. His work has been shown from Los Angeles to Shanghai, but, in recent years, Evergonâ€s health has rendered him housebound. The exhibition is a collaboration with former student, friend and model Jean-Jacques Ringuette, capturing living things that only live indoors. The creative partnership may be symbiotic in the same way that a plant and its human individual are. When art is made, is this not a form of photosynthesis?

The show also features a series of memento mori-style still-life prints. Unlike the rich, natural colors of the house plants, the still lifes conjure fleshy decay. At luncheons where meat is served, it sits on a platter as the centerpiece of the table. After the lunch guests are full and float on to the next room, while the unfinished carcass is neglected. Purposeless, its death is consummated. The flowers of these visually opulent images are browning, their petals brittle and tendrils wilted. The crowded frames feature water-damaged photographs, bronze amphibian figurines and a model skeleton. Glittering red rubies of DayQuil and cherry tomatoes are scattered on the table, posing the question: ‘what does one do to feel well?â€. The scene suggests the simultaneous existence of the living, the already-lived, and the intangible nostalgia for life itself. As a testament to expiration, these still-lifes subscribe to the more cynical ontology of the house plant: it is painfully perishable.

From sunny windowsills and forgotten dentist office corners, plants extend stems of companionship, whispering to its caregiver. Evergonâ€s Winter Garden reminds viewers to water, resoil and tend to these symbols of how marvellous life is while it is still living.

« Au Canada, comme ailleurs, peu de créations contemporaines syriennes ont été présentées et la Syrie nâ€apparaît quâ€Ã  travers le prisme des images télévisées, dans sa nudité crue, dévastée par la guerre. Près de six ans après le début des premières manifestations, il est difficile de prendre de la distance et de pouvoir parler dâ€une nouvelle forme artistique. Il sâ€agira donc plutôt de montrer ce que des artistes syriens aujourdâ€hui donnent à voir en cette période de chaos » [1].

– Delphine Leccas, commissaire

Delphine Leccas est cofondatrice de lâ€association IN (AIN), ayant pour objectif de soutenir la création contemporaine. Elle réside à Damas en Syrie durant près de 15 ans — de 1998 à 2011 —, où elle est responsable de la programmation culturelle du Centre Culturel Français de Damas. Leccas y organise chaque mois des expositions individuelles afin de soutenir la reconnaissance de lâ€Ã©mergente scène artistique syrienne et créer le premier festival de photo et de vidéo de Damas : Les Journées de la Photographie. En 2008, elle est programmatrice des expositions dans le cadre de Damas Capitale Arabe de la Culture, puis elle organise la première édition dâ€un festival indépendant à Damas : Visual Arts Festival Damascus. La manifestation est présentée sous forme itinérante, de 2010 à 2015 dans dâ€autres villes de la Syrie. Depuis, elle est commissaire et co-commissaire de diverses expositions collectives présentées à lâ€internationale. Dernièrement, elle soumet le projet dâ€actualité au Centre des arts actuels Skol, de lâ€Ã©difice Belgo à Montréal — exposition acclamée par lâ€ensemble de la métropole pour sa grande portée significative en ce temps dâ€assauts et de perturbations mondiales[2].

Paysage Interne permet de défier lâ€indifférence et lâ€insensibilité, de même que de ressentir la situation en Syrie par le biais de créations dâ€artistes syriens, et non pas à travers des images médiatiques du pays dévasté par la guerre. Le projet propose dâ€en apprendre davantage sur le contexte déconcertant, ainsi que sur ses habitants démolis. Les cinq Å“uvres de Monif Ajaj, Aiham Dib, Reem Al Ghazzi, Randa Maddah, et Muzaffar Salman témoignent dâ€une certaine délicatesse par la fragilité des matériaux et lâ€intimité des contenus. Ils illustrent avec dévotion et pudeur, la violence comme le chaos des manifestations et conflits alarmants.

Lâ€exposition sâ€amorce avec lâ€Å“uvre immersive projetée sur toile, Light Horizon (2012) de Randa Maddah. Lâ€artiste donne à voir les décombres dâ€une maison, aujourdâ€hui inhabitée et détruite. Dans la scène, un pan de rideau vole au vent, une femme sâ€introduit dans le cadre. Elle tente de balayer et de laver le sol couvert de détritus, puis y installe un tapis ainsi qu’une table ornée de chaises, et enfin sâ€assoie en regardant le paysage que laissent entrevoir les ruines. Le contraste scénique et la série de gestes empreints dâ€humanité démontrent le quotidien et les habitudes remaniées des résidents syriens face à la consternation.

Lâ€Å“uvre de Reem Al Ghazzi, Damascus Rain (2013), une vidéo concise présentée en répétition, renvoie à une nuit à Damas durant laquelle les clapotements de la pluie relayent les bruits sourds de tirs dâ€armes et dâ€explosifs. La dialectique entre la trame sonore déflagrante, la scène trouble éclairée par les lumières de la ville et lâ€effet de boucle, établit instantanément une forme dâ€angoisse chez le visiteur. Il est pratiquement impossible dâ€Ã©couter lâ€extrait en reprise…

Les photographies habitées par la présence humaine de Muzaffar Salman, bien quâ€elles contrastent avec les paysages en attentes et en absences de vie de lâ€artiste Aiham Dib, témoignent pourtant dâ€une logique — dâ€une tension insaisissable. De part et dâ€autre, Salman est photographe pour le quotidien syrien Al-Watan, puis pour The Associated Press, et est engagé depuis 2013 afin de couvrir le conflit à Alep. Dib, quant à lui est photographe pour lâ€Office national du cinéma syrien.

Lâ€enfilade de dessins expressifs et ardents de Monif Ajaj se compose de personnages déconstruits, de véhicules militaires brisants et dâ€explosions qui offrent une perspective différente à la photographie documentaire. Les sujets émanent de lâ€artiste, les traits brusques définissent son état dâ€Ã¢me, ses traumatismes. Ses dessins subjectifs deviennent alors des transpositions personnelles des impasses de la guerre.

Lâ€expographie sans artifice, initiée par Leccas, permet aux visiteurs de se projeter dans les situations que propose chacun des cinq projets. Dans la circonstance de crise actuelle à lâ€Ã©gard des réfugiés syriens, entre autres par les diverses astrictions politiques en cours aux États-Unis, la visite de Paysage Interne est requise. Lâ€exposition permet dâ€observer intimement ce territoire — de transposer et reconstituer le paysage concret du pays et non pas celui obscène, ou en surface que suggère constamment les médias par des images dâ€une extrême violence.

[1] Tiré du communiqué de Skol, Exposition de groupe, Paysage interne.
[2] Idem. 

En ce début de 2017, année honorifique et commémorative des 375 ans de la ville de Montréal, la Galerie Huges Charbonneau instaure sa nouvelle exposition Recomposer la ville — Space for Agency, constituée dâ€Isabelle Hayeur, Maria Hupfield, David Lafrance et Alain Paiement. Les Å“uvres y interrogent les notions de « public » et de « collectif ». Par lâ€exposition et son contenu, la galerie suggère divers questionnements sur lâ€occupation du territoire urbain : les pouvoirs en place ; les stratégies citoyennes de résistance et dâ€engagement ; les implications du vivre ensemble — voire de sa possibilité dans certains contextes politiques actuels[1]. Sous deux vecteurs en constante dialectique, les artistes de lâ€exposition offrent un apport critique qui aborde différemment les célébrations de lâ€anniversaire de la ville. Dâ€une part, ils réimaginent la topographie de celle-ci, et dâ€autre part, ils invitent à penser de quelles façons lâ€on peut se réapproprier socialement et culturellement son environnement[2].

Dans lâ€exposition, Isabelle Hayeur propose deux Å“uvres. La première, une photographie de la série Nuits américaines, Day Trading (2006), révèle le chantier de construction dâ€un édifice simulé, sans fonction précise, obtenu par de multiples manipulations digitales. Les effets de perspectives complexes, toutes factices, troublent le discernement de ce qui réel ou irréel dans la composition. La seconde, la vidéo Pulse (2015), est en corrélation avec les manifestations et bouleversements entamés par la grève étudiante du printemps 2015 et toutes autres luttes sociales dénonçant les mesures dâ€austérité néolibérales ou les écrasements de la liberté politique ressentis au Québec. Lâ€artiste y a reconstitué un amalgame dâ€images trouvées et captées par elle-même, offrant une réactivation séquentielle des oppressions.

Maria Hupfield quant à elle, expose son révélateur projet Survival and Other Acts of Defiance (2011). Dans la vidéo, lâ€artiste sâ€objective en sautant en récurrence avec des bottes ornées de multiples grelots en étain qui provoquent un son affirmatif. Par son corps en réitération et lâ€action en perpétuelle répétition, elle atteste son statut de femme autochtone en renégociation avec son environnement — urbain ou naturel. Dans ce « rituel », elle y conteste des notions de sa démarche relatives à la mémoire culturelle et lâ€identité. À lâ€Ã©chelle humaine par son format, lâ€Å“uvre est accompagnée dâ€un X au sol, incitant ainsi le visiteur à sâ€y joindre, et à sâ€y positionner. Lâ€immersion directe provoque lâ€effet momentané et immédiat de la performance.

David Lafrance présente des sculptures de bois en ronde bosse, desquelles les formes sont dégrossies par taille directe, puis assemblées et peintes. Issue de la série Place publique (2016), les deux Å“uvres Place publique 1 et 4, suggèrent des projets dâ€urbanistes imaginaires. Formellement par leurs structures en étagement, les miniatures rappellent des aménagements autour desquels se rassemblent les citadins. Toutefois, la blancheur de ces places subtiles se retrouve troublée par des éclaboussures monochromes alliées à lâ€ajout de croquis botaniques démesurés. Le résultat de chacune des compositions instaure des espaces publics fictifs, ternes et inquiétants.

Alain Paiement offre pour sa part une production issue de son plus récent corpus, Voisinage contextuel (2016). La photographie sâ€ouvre sur un espace, une carte de la métropole non pas fonctionnelle, plutôt surabondante et disproportionnée. La cartographie montre dâ€un point de vue aérien des humains qui habitent les quartiers de la ville, et qui lâ€animent collectivement au quotidien dans lâ€instantanéité.

En définitive, la galerie recompose le paysage de lâ€art contemporain, celui de sa ville et de lâ€Ã‰difice Belgo : Montréal. La sélection des artistes nâ€est pas hasardeuse, chacun a une proximité particulière avec la métropole — quâ€il la fréquente, y travaille ou y habite. Les Å“uvres, bien que différentes, les unes et les autres, témoignent dâ€une ville imaginée et réappropriée par ses occupants. Le déploiement expographique sobre et habile confère à un dialogue cohérent et unifie les pratiques distinctes des artistes. Recomposer la ville — Space for agency ne catalyse pas quâ€une critique, mais un regard pluriel sur un espace et sa population…

[1] Tiré du communiqué de la Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Exposition Recomposer la ville – Spaces for Agency
[2] Idem.

Dan Braultâ€s new exhibition of work, Peinture générale…ou Presque, at Galerie Laroche Joncas has the chaotic ambience he has become known and appreciated for. These acrylic and oil paintings operate along the tension-line between mechanical and handmade, the expressive and the slickly stylized. Brault plays on the outsider art aesthetic, and is obviously influenced by street art, digital technologies and pop art.

It is often said that Dan Braultâ€s work is playful and positive. In fact, Brault said to La Presse[i]:

“Il y a une part de naïveté dans mon travail. On y trouve mes réflexions sur la vie, sur ce que c’est que d’être un citoyen responsable et la raison qui justifie de créer une image de plus dans le monde, aujourd’hui.”

Deeper and sometimes darker concerns can be detected therein with longer viewing and a wry commentary on the nature of our society.

To be sure there is a certain joy in the sheer visual abundance, in the free association, in the jazz-like riffs, in the effusion of colour and form. Viewing them is a somewhat frustrating experience however, it is like dealing with a particularly infuriating puzzle. Sometimes the attempt to riddle out the references in these works, to struggle to parse meaning from symbols yields little. Yet, telling a story doesnâ€t really seem to be the point here. The works entertain on one level to be sure, especially visually, but they also reveal what seems to be a sophisticated commentary on the nature of looking and naming, and the history of art from the early 20^th century to present day.

In 2014, Brault was selected to be one of the one hundred artists featured in the book 100 Painters of Tomorrow, by Kurt Beers, of Beers London. Beers was originally a Canadian gallery but has now been operating out of England for several years, and it has obtained an esteemed reputation there. This has contributed to Braultâ€s rise in success, but it is clear that his work has a deserved place in Quebec painting and in the scheme of contemporary art, particularly in the popular genre of faux outsider art. Braultâ€s work openly betrays the influence of his former professor, David Elliot, in the use of painted collage and cheerfully chaotic mood. Other influences can be spied in Basquiat-style childlike doodles and there are numerous neo-expressionist elements to be found in these paintings as well.

Ultimately, trying to parse meaning out of the chaos of symbols feels like a fruitless task in this mad carnival. They feel as if they are about the joy and the torment of existence, the explosive nature of the youthful mind when one is just starting to pick out meaning and symbol and shape. It could be a depiction of the mind of a child starting to recognize signs, when perception begins to fall away from unbiased pure awareness and becomes a mind that judges, separates and names, and in fact becomes obsessed with doing so.

We encounter a plethora of elements borrowed and collaged especially from lowbrow sources such as design, pop art, street art and so on. References to digital culture and the nature of new and old media abound, as well as marks which declare the presence and absence of the artistâ€s hand, and Brault is known to work with a stencil-maker to create many of the machine-made features.  The constant references to the dichotomy between mechanized making and the handmade signature of the artist, which bears the direct trace of humanity in the remnants of the brushstroke, raises questions about what is true art, and what is valued and what is not.

These works also call up ideas tendered by deconstructionism, of the relationship between the signified and the signifier. To my mind, the works bear a certain relationship to Derridaâ€s compelling notion that words and signs can never fully express what is meant, only talk around the thing with other words and signs. These paintings seem to express the impossibility and absurdity of true communication, the futility of establishing meaning or order in a chaotic, overwhelming, visually overstimulating and commercially over-saturated society.

We are overwhelmed by the surfeit of choices we have today, yet in some ways we also seem to have less and less choices and freedoms. Our paths narrow, the divide between rich and poor widens. In a world where we are told by the media that we can have it all, we end up with little, mired in acquisitiveness and consumer culture. Where everything is disposable, nothing is valued over anything else. And that is what these works seem to embody, collaged chaos, they celebrate the random and the anti-aesthetic to some degree, and not much concerned with traditional means of expression, composition, or beauty. It sometimes feels like an ironic critique of consumer culture while itself being part of it, and this one of the persistent paradoxes of the business of art.  Ultimately, however, the work doesnâ€t seem to pass judgment, in fact, it seems to elevate stencilled designs used in the tackiest advertisements and the cheapest decals for home décor to the same level as iconic images of influential artists like Phillip Guston.

To give a sense of the work, let us look at the characteristic larger piece Watchtower which is dominated by a raven on a stump with a thought bubble and a spider inside, a cloud emitting a lightning symbol and a pixelated digital flame. The canvas also features band-aids, a worm shaped like a cigar, a Guston-style eye, a digital/painterly hybrid cloud of smoke, some elements of nature, and a small pile of olives which make me think of eggs because of the bird. In the centre there is a large stencilled flower which glows like a sun.

In Heatwave we are inundated by a cactus, a hand making an OK gesture, clouds, a cupcake, a snail, a not-dead (according to Laroche) bluebird thinking of a Tetris-like symbol, an oak leaf, a potted plant, wallpaper, another Guston eye, coin slots, and what is perhaps a pixelated campfire. Swoops of orange-hot Photoshop-like lines likely represent hot air. There is a blue background, blue sky, the blue water of summer and what seem to be two large painterly blueberries at centre. A cactus reminds us of desert climes. The repetition of the Guston eye makes me think of the nature of seeing and perception.

Perhaps a synesthesiac homage to music Blazing Raw Vibes! also conveys the sensation of heat, digitally rendered and emanating from the large red and orange amorphous shape that is marked like a player piano reel on crack. Video-game faces are rendered in an expressive style while a gramophone spits out candy music. Snakes, band-aids and the ubiquitous Tetris symbol squabble in the picture plane. What appears to be a bullet hangs centrally in suspension like the sword of Damocles.

Lingering in Timeâ€s House features a skull penetrated by a fishhook which suspended over a black and white patterned surface like a kitchen or bathroom linoleum floor. Traditionally still lives, appropriately called in French nature morte are assembled with fruit and various objects, classically often depicting reminders of mortality. This one features bottles dripping with wax or paint and a coffee mug, all loosely painted, and an apple and the skull arenâ€t far away. Random objects such as stencilled binoculars—another reference to the nature of looking—a pumpernickel bagel, a barber pole, a loosely painted bowling ball and a cartoon Flintstoneâ€s club also hover around the picture plane.

While both Laroche and Brault maintain that the paintings have individual and personal meaning, and Iâ€m sure that is true, that was not my overall impression. I believe that the meaning present is irrelevant and superficial, and that it is intentionally so. The paintings are more about the subject of meaning itself, or the lack thereof. They deal with how meaning is constructed and deconstructed, how we strive to communicate and how we fail to do so. They are about how pictures are made, how images make up our culture and fill our awareness, for better or for worse, from the highbrow to the lowbrow. These works are also about the methodology by which images are formed within our minds, how labels and names are given and sorted. They also deal with how what is considered acceptable visually and artistically is in a constant state of flux, how we use images commercially, and the effect that has on the state of art as a whole.

[i] Éric Clément, La Presse, January 3, 2015

Visiting the solo exhibition, Harness the Sun, by Leyla Majeri, a young artist from Montreal, a colorful and joyful universe comes to us.

It’s an imaginary landscape presenting smiling abstract figures, irregular shapes and mysterious forms, in paper or plastic. The works suggest an ambiguous world relating to the natural forces to the cosmos and to Earth’s cycles.

Leyla is a gardener, co-designing a landscape. She works with simple materials in their basic states.
Her practice developed primarily in printmaking (poster, zines, artist’s books) and expanded into experimental animation film. Her work is a reflexion on the ecological link between nature and imagination.

The nature of her shapes, in their simplicity and subtlety, are not self-evident. As her collaborator Katherine Kline said “The smiling faces, a signature in Leylaâ€s work, are both an expression of the artist, and a gesture toward what lies beyond the artist.”

In her exhibition at Arprim Gallery, Leyla creates a vibrant space where the floating figures dialogue with each other. These figures can be natural and supernatural beings at once.
Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Leyla Majeri maintained many features inspired by living beings. She models visual elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. As the artist Joan Miró explained in 1948, “for me a form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something”.

Leyla Majeri’s landscape appear in continuous transformation, as if figures took a new shapes, or energies or other properties converted into different forms.
The installation surprises the wandering viewer looking for details or connections attempting to decipher a final meaning. Two eyes, a smile and a question displayed on the floor: “Why do I get so sensitive?”.
Color spots on the wall or writings on the floor remind the viewer that a party or a mysterious phenomena has just happened or could happen. No one answers. The ambiguity is left there, hanging.

Eleonora Milner

Galerie B-312 starts the new season hosting two interesting exhibitions, The Cellule dedicated to Mathieu Latulippe and One Hundred Twenty Five Hours to Amélie Laurence Fortin. They are both multidisciplinary artists discussing in different ways issues of Time and Space in the contemporary world.

Mathieu Latulippe presents several works using different media to explore the links between the world of medicine and the environment, especially the concept of health care in rapport to the architecture, landscape and nature.
Mathieu choose the Sanatorium, a medical facility for tuberculosis located in the mountains, as metaphor to investigate important themes such as Rationality vs Irrationality and Nature vs Science.
Photo archives, paintings and medical tools displayed at the exhibition refer to it and to the myth of an invincible science. But what are some of the limitations of science? How far will technology go? Could humanity live completely self-sustained in a technological world?

In a transparent technological cell in the middle of the room, a sculpture of a child looks at us through swimming goggles. We are not able to see his eyes. We are not sure he’s breathing air.
Despite his aseptic and clinical environment, a painting of a mountain stands out, as nostalgia for something he’s never experienced. In the cell, normal laws of reality no longer fully apply and laws of nature are supposedly suspended.

As in the science fiction art film Stalker (A.Tarkovsky, 1979) in which the Stalker works in some unclear area in an indefinite future through the “Zone”, Mathieu Latulippe’s work demands us rethink the relationship between desires of invincibility and reality, the vagaries of human intentions and the need for mystery. He invites us to rethink our thoughts about technology and its dangerous consequences.
As Stalker said in the film: “[…] the zone is exactly how we created it ourselves, like the state of our spirits… but what is happening, that does not depend on the zone, that depends on us.”

Amélie Laurence Fortin presents a minimal black sculpture hanging from the ceiling. From a tiny hole a non-stop trickle of small glass marbles flows into a geometric cavity on the floor. Like a large hourglass, the mysterious sculpture becomes a device used to measure the passage of time. In this case, 125 hours, as the title suggests. In fact the sand’s quantity is regulated to the exhibition’s period. Once the 125th day is reached, the sand will cover the whole cavity.

It’s a mobile sculpture, changeable with the time. The viewer is able to see the entire process and get lost in idea of time: thoughts of the past, days, years, or the future are all conceptual ideas, paradigms, which exist only in our mind. In Amélie’s work, Time, an abstract concept, becomes a real physical entity.

The dramatic light, the minimal shapes, the black and white colors and the silence remind us of a solemn event commonly perceived by all cultures and viewers.
Amélie’s work explores the time to be experienced with the mind. Analyzing time, the viewer will also need to be aware of their perceptions as well. What are the eyes that sense the light of day and darkness of night? Without an understanding of consciousness that is perceiving time, how will we know if our understanding is distorted or not? How do we fit this variable of changing perspective of the viewer as we seek to understand truth?

Another incredible movie comes to mind.
As in 2001: A Space Odyssey film (Kubrick, 1968) the iconic monolith has been subject to countless interpretations, Amélie’s work suggest multiple thoughts.
It is up to us to find our own.

Eleonora Milner