ART WRITINGS
The artist has contributed to over 50 exhibition catalogues. During her tenure as Director/Curator of the McClure Gallery, she inaugurated a publication programme, creating approximately 40 catalogues, including for such artists as David Elliot, Leopold Plotek, Harold Klunder, Lorraine Pritchard, Peter Krauzs, Maskull Laserre, David Lafrance, Antonietta Grassi, Russell T. Gordon, Trevor Kiernander, Benjamin Klein, Sue Rusk, Jean Pierre Laroque, Jennifer Hornyak and Michael Merrill. As a freelance writer/curator she has also contributed critical texts for retrospective catalogues such as: Brigitte Radecki, Echo; Lise Helene Larin, Foret / Foray and Ann McCall, Les voix de la nature / Voices of Nature. In 2023, she wrote the catalogue text for Éphémères Imaginaires, a drawing exhibition curated by Frank Mulvey and Giuseppe di Leo.
Selected Excerpts
‘Trace of Time’ (from catalogue text for exhibition Éphémères Imaginaires, curated by Frank Mulvey and Giuseppe di Leo, 2023).
“Philosophers, artists and poets have, throughout the ages, pondered art’s relationship to time and timelessness, seen and unseen, permanent and impermanent. Éphémères imaginaires explores these themes through drawing – that most intimate of arts, closest to the marrow, whose linear unfolding traces time itself. John Berger’s words allude to drawing’s capacity not only to probe the ephemeral, but to arrive somewhere. The works featured in this exhibition do just that, attending to the concept of transience through a panoply of strategies. From issues of collective memory and dream to a petition to immerse ourselves in the flux of time, they map a wide arc.”
‘An Archive of Looking: The works of Ann McCall’
(excerpt from catalogue: Les Voix de la nature / Voices of Nature, 2024).
“Fragments. Leitmotifs of branches in isolated enclaves. The buried trunks of birch. Weather maps charting the night skies. …These fragments bear witness to artist Ann McCall’s persistent looking – at nature, its flora and fauna, the earth and sky. Anchored firmly within the picture plane, they represent a visual archive of her memory, perception and concern. …McCall eschews traditional landscape, however, and any penchant for romantic nostalgia, embracing a more modern approach: montage, collage, multiple viewpoints and perspectives. Each fragment or glimpse, isolated within its frame, sits like a sentinel against a distant horizon, reaches out from beneath the earth, or leans in from a dark rectangle hovering at the paper’s edge. Frames overlap, zoom in, pull away, creating a sense of being both close and far but always in relation to the land.”
Lise-Helene Larin: FORÊT / FORAY
(excerpt from catalogue text, 2020)
Forest: a “lush” metaphor, evocative, resonant. Foray: “an attack, a sudden incursion into enemy territory, especially to obtain something – a raid.” Between these two words, what interface? The raid is by whom? Is the forest in danger? Are we?
The forest metaphor has recycled through the work of Lise-Hélène Larin since 1980. …(It) represents a touchstone to all the work that preceded it and foreshadows all that would come. It speaks to her preoccupations as artist, activist and pedagogue. Those preoccupations coalesce around recurring themes. For one, the nature of aesthetic experience. Larin engages in a haptic, intuitive inquiry, seeking to understand art’s components: artist, art object, viewer. She seeks to understand their relationship, their boundaries and if and how those boundaries might be transgressed. This concern takes her from the isolation of her studio to the streets, to community, and to the intellectual rigours of a doctorate.
ECHO: the Works of Brigitte Radecki
(excerpt from catalogue text, 2019)
“Brigitte Radecki has been making art for over four decades. Throughout her practice, sculpture and then paint have been used to shape and manipulate perception and space, and to collapse the binary categories that separate painting from sculpture, abstraction from representation, modern from post-modern, mind from matter. Her works are complex, multilayered and enigmatic. Issues, themes and literary allusions deftly interweave throughout. …As an artist, Brigitte Radecki courts ambiguity. She speaks towards and from the spaces “in between.” As to her artistic intent, however, there is no equivocation. She is committed to the sensuous materiality and visual clarity of abstraction. As a post-modernist and feminist, she seeks to disrupt and re-animate the modernist discourse, to open up spaces for alternative narratives culled from the silenced voices of others. She asks how, in our contemporary world, abstraction can mean – “mean anything at all.”
Maskull Laserre / PENDULUM
(excerpt from foreword, exhibition catalogue, McClure Gallery, 2015)
Lasserre’s sculptural forms are precisely and beautifully crafted, masterfully engineered. Ironically, such precision and certainty of form serve to undermine certainty. We sense in each finely wrought shape – be it chair, bird, door, fallen bough or grenade – a slippage of meaning, a porosity of possible interpretation. Everything pivots and plunges towards a lack of closure, trading in categorization, conclusion for a provocation of experience that is at once haptic, aesthetic and deeply ambiguous. This lack of closure represents not a dead end, but rather an opening towards liminality – a quality of experience Laserre covets no less in life than in art.”
Jennifer Hornyak / The Figure Revisited
(excerpt from catalogue text, “Woman with Brush,” McClure Gallery, 2015)
“It is a cliché to view the relationship between the artist and the canvas as a kind of encounter, a face-off between self and other, or between self and self. But it is hard to avoid such conclusions when looking at Hornyak’s isolated “femmes” floating alone in their unhinged pictorial spaces. The scale is equivalent to that of a mirror. The artist looks at a surface and paints an image that looks back at us through the paint. The gazes are unsteady, they withhold and yet they seek the reciprocal look they engender. We feel palpably that their presence assumes our own. We come to suspect that these works lay out a rich vocabulary of signs as deeply personal as they are collective. How complex and layered is the artist’s encounter with her own gaze, how unflinching and brave.”
David Lafrance / Les palais inegaux
(excerpt from foreword, exhibition catalogue, McClure Gallery, 2012)
“It is a truism in literature that the most universal of themes are mined deep in the strata of the local. Like a good novel then, David Lafrance’s work is riven with the lusts and tribulations of his quotidian experience and childhood recollections. Unlike a novel, however, there is no beginning, middle or end; the flat surface of canvas allows a simultaneity of unfolding and disclosure. We read the broken landscape with its strange foliage, aberrant marks, architectural structures and cultural signifiers of an urban underground – sometimes privy to their meaning, sometimes not. One imagines Lafrance like a wandering woodsman/flaneur gathering scattered artifacts and detritus on his daily rounds. He returns to the studio, takes off his boots, sets up his easel and begins to transcribe, invent, imagine in paint, the tale of his sojourn – a poetic but no less existential quest for balance and authenticity.”
Harold Klunder / amorphous amoebae.
(excerpt from foreword, exhibition catalogue, McClure Gallery, 2007)
“Standing before a Harold Klunder painting, I’m moved by equal and opposite desires. The first to fall silent, give in to the visceral pull of looking, let the pigment sing, the floating forms uplift, the saturated colours speak to me of, well, a kind of unrelenting beauty and hope. Second, after such looking, there’s conversation wanted. My queries are specific: Is it stand oil or sun-thickened linseed oil that carries the pigment down the canvas lake laden rain? What hue of yellow gently nudges my eye from left to middle ground, urging it to pause at half-way stations, waylaid by forms familiar and strange, coaxing it finally to the sun burnt oval looming in the top right corner? How has he calibrated those structural scaffolds, at once hidden and revealed, that echo of Mondrian but less severe, jazzed up? How does he weave all those resonant shapes, finely honed hues and rhythms of colour, encrusted impasto, and, equally important – feelings – into one flat picture plane and still maintain such poise? Poise and humanity.”