In this latest exhibition that runs parallel to Ed Pien’s solo presentation at 1700 La Poste, the artist further shows his wide ranging practices, foregrounding photography, video and installation. Pien’s interest in the political and social forces that exact on and express through the body continues to be the central thread of his artistic concern.
Suspension is an installation presented in the vitrine. In this work, a video of two aerial dancers deftly negotiate space and gravity, is projected onto suspended plexiglass and mirrors. Illusionary play with space and scale is compounded as the rotating disks cast the two performing bodies around the surrounding walls and beyond the interior of the gallery space.
The artist’s own performing and naked body becomes the focus of a set of never shown photographs entitled Mermaid realized in 2011. Pien also exploits his own body in a series of videos presented, with Blow Up, StripTease and Candle extending back over sixteen years. These videos and set of photographs poignantly convey an all-too human body. With playful references to cinema, Pien shares his own vulnerable body, a body like all others, that are subject to political and social forces.
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Ed Pien is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Pien has exhibited nationally and internationally including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Drawing Centre, New York; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Centro Nacional é las Artes, Mexico City; the Goethe Institute, Berlin; Middlesbrough Art Gallery, UK; W139, Amsterdam; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Contemporary Art Museum in Monterrey, Mexico; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and La Biennale de Montreal 2000 and 2002 and recently at the Moscow Bienale (2013), Sydney Biennale (2012) and in the Oh Canada exhibition at MassMoca. His ambitious large-scale installations, drawings and paper cuts are featured in the permanent collections of many Canadian museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. His work was featured in the Canadian Biennale of the National Gallery of Canada in 2011 and 2015.
Pien draws on sources both Eastern and Western to create his work, including Asian ghost stories, hell scrolls, calligraphic traditions and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, creating sensual, drawing-based installations using ink and translucent paper (like Earthly Delights in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). The spectator is invited to walk into these floor-to-ceiling environments and approach the half-human, half-animal monsters within. In his most recent body of work, Pien has replaced ink and gouache with an xacto knife in order to produce large-scale paper cuts. In the summer of 2004, he travelled to China to continue research on myths and legends found in Chinese folklore; he returned from the trip excited about a form of art that is centuries old in its tradition.
