Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain ispleased to present an intimate look at the constant exploration of Karilee Fuglem; wherein her studio is transported and re-created in the gallery. Rather than a clinical demonstration of the artist's practice, Fuglem invites visitors to discover links between materials, shapes, shadows and light play which are unplanned discoveries resulting from her thoughtful observance - an "artists' engagement" that highlights another side of this celebrated Canadian artist.
"Since last fall, I've had the luxury to lose myself in "studio mode," returning to explorations begun in stolen moments while preparing other projects the past few years.
The daylight pouring into my studio informs everything I do there. On bright, sunny days I dart around, moving bits of reflective material around so I can watch the patterns of light flung across the walls. On cloudy days when I'm drawn inward, reading and making anything that occurs to me, a subtle shift in luminescence might draw my glance to a shadowy wall. Things converse visually with each other, unintended juxtapositions offer a dream-reading.
I've been working like this without an orderly plan, but a strong sense of commitment to thinking by doing, looking at what I make, tearing it down, or adding to it or moving it to see it afresh. In this exhibition I will continue this process, occupying the gallery as a working space. Here, I embrace the fact that like everything else, the visual is always shifting: two eyes try to focus, light and shadow battle it out, and psychic/ emotional triggers alter what we see like clouds intermittently blocking the sun.
Certain parameters persist. I work with invented techniques, drawing in space or mimicking insects to help me articulate notions that are beyond grasp, and best approached intimately. I try to keep the process open and questioning, using looping systems in material (threads looped in and out of each other, bits of tape looped around my finger, historical material scooped up next to current concerns). My body is the measuring device, for reasons of scale and to understand where I am here. Having touched lengths of material, I measure distances "by hand," so they also stand in for yours, visual touch markers.
The material I choose is sometimes nearly as invisible as the space it articulates, and sometimes dumb and ever-present, like tape, which I love for its readiness to become an architectures of holes, always with the sticky side out, inviting disaster. Building something up over time with materials that are doomed to decay almost immediately is strangely liberating.
Some photographs here started as preemptive efforts against this inevitable loss. Looking at them is like flipping through a family album -- see how they've grown! But photographs on their own demand a different kind of consideration, a pictorial isolation, that I struggle against, cutting holes or piercing them to return them to the spatial life they mirror. When personal photos sneak into the action I try to draw out their life with wires, or disturb their seductive surfaces with constantly shifting light.
A cycle of yearning and learning stirs my choice of reading material, too, like journals of explorers whose names mark rivers near my childhood home in south-central BC, first-person accounts of early contact between non-natives and BC First Nations, where both viewpoints filter through layers of subtext. I've been photographing pages from these books upside down, in daylight, for its likeness to land seen from above, and to see the "rivers" in the typesetting which I trace with clear acrylic, visible only from oblique angles. Photos of my hands with their prominent stream-like veins startle me: I am landscape."
- Karilee Fuglem
The artist wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their generous support.
