Marie-Chrystine Landry : La légèreté des paysages
Landscapes seem to be the only remaining places to escape from others. Some we contemplate, holding fragments of them in our memories, while others go unnoticed: for instance those seen from a car window, those that are captured in the corner of the eye and become nothing more than lines of blurry colour and stretched-out shapes - at once abstract and narrative.
A landscape doesn't need to exist, it merely requires a sign of state: solid or liquid, a spatial plane or a colour. Out of nowhere, a gap is created; everything re-emerges and all activity freezes.
With the precision of a plastic surgeon, the savoir-faire of a cabinetmaker and the skill of an architect, Marie-Chrystine Landry constructs sculptures out of weathered wood, unearthed from various landscapes. She removes the skin and creates forms, which through the accumulation of thousands of little strips of colourful materials become new fragments themselves - monumental sites on an intimate scale, spare parts in case of a landscape outage.
Landry is emblematic of recent generations of formalist sculptors: a perfectionist in her field, compelled to undo and redo, her dexterity and clever precision hallmarks of her classical training. Nothing escapes her mastery of space - not weight, volume, balance nor scale. This new work, which constitutes La légèreté des paysages, her first exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, is further proof of the artist's keen ability to convey the grand within the intimate.
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Marie-Chrystine Landry was born in Sainte-Hélène-de-Kamouraska in 1956. She holds a Master's in Fine Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Since 1985, she has participated in numerous group shows including Paysagistes (2004), Artefact 2001 (on the Lachine Canal) and the Métis Festival international des jardins contemporains (2000). She has had solo exhibitions at the Galerie d'art du Centre culturel de l'Université de Sherbrooke, the Musée régional de Rimouski, Galerie Verticale (Laval) and Galerie Graff (Montreal. Her works are part of public collections, such as La collection Prêt d'oeuvres d'art du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Canada Council Art Bank. Landry has also created many projects through the gouvernement du Québec's 1% public art program. She lives and works in Montréal and Gatineau.
Karilee Fuglem, The 12 Mile, 2010, wood, screens,
looped video, table, 63.5 x 99 x 56 cm
Karilee Fuglem : The 12 Mile P
ierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present the Montreal premiere of Karilee Fuglem's latest video work The 12 Mile, running in parallel with La légèreté des paysages, an exhibition of new sculpture by Marie-Chrystine Landry.
Twelve Mile Creek runs north through St. Catharines, at a fast pace. The river path has been redirected a few times in the past two hundred years, to accommodate various revisions of the Welland Canal, but for the most part it has followed the same path for centuries, according to legend and historical record. The Twelve Mile makes its way through the diaries of Elizabeth Simcoe and Anna Jameson, the multiple retellings of Harriet Tubman and Laura Secord, and in tales of lesser known characters of the region.
The video is split into two screens, each tilted slightly toward the other to approximate a book lying open on a table. The river image runs steadily in one direction and then the other, with moments of the current running towards each other, but not as though mirroring itself. The rhythm of movement parallels that of reading, turning pages, looking from one side to the other. When the current changes direction there is a bodily shift as well, bouleversant for those of us who are susceptible to such changes in movement. The 12 Mile was developed during an exhibition residency at Rodman Hall Art Centre, St Catharines.
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Originally from BC and living in Montreal since 1989, Karilee Fuglem makes art that is informed by a heightened sensitivity to the subtleties of nonverbal communication that underscores life in a bilingual city. Sometimes constructed with thread nearly as invisible as the space it describes, or familiar materials made magical by being reimagined, her artwork speaks a subterranean language of light, movement and visceral sensation, informed by a deeply considered understanding of the environment in which it is situated.
She has had solo exhibitions at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in 2002, 2005 and 2008, Montreal's Darling Foundry (2006); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2003), Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2001) and Optica, Montreal (1996). Her work has also been seen in group exhibitions across Canada, notably, the Musée de Rimouski, La Manif, Quebec (1999), as well as the National Gallery of Canada (2007), The Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec (2010, 2004) and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal (1997), who also have her work in their collections. In 2010 she was a finalist for the Prix Louis-Comtois. This spring she will participate in the 2011 Montreal Biennale, having been part of its inauguration year in 1998.
