February 6 – 27, 2016
Opening: Saturday February 6 from 3 pm to 6 pm | Artist in attendance
Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain is excited to present Karilee Fuglem‘s first solo exhibition at the Toronto gallery, What I see each moment I’ve never seen before.
Karilee Fuglem‘s work takes the form of installations, drawings, photographs and artist books, through which she explores visual subtlety as a key to embodied perception. Raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, she has lived in Montreal since 1989, and frequently travels back and forth between her two “homelands.” She has presented solo exhibitions across Canada, notably at the Darling Foundry (Montreal), the Koffler Gallery (Toronto), Oakville Galleries (Oakville, Ontario), Rodman Hall (St-Catharines, Ontario) and numerous group exhibitions, including the Biennale de Montréal in 1998 and 2011. Fuglem has also exhibited in group exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain, the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec and the National Gallery of Canada, who hold her work in their collections.
The artist states about the exhibition:
“A few months ago I made a sign for my studio, which still makes me burst out laughing. “NO IDEAS”* may seem like a declaration of defeat, but for me it’s a deadpan directive back to the here and now, clearing my head of projects, theories, explanations, metaphoric parallels. They’re all distractions from things like this little spot of light projected from who knows what, slowly coursing across my wall.
The work I’ll present at Centre Space is, like everything I see, made of reflective surfaces. They move when we move, giving back scraps of whatever is around them. The displaced air that sets them adrift is the same air that touches our skin. We feel what we see. Tellingly, some of this work began with photographs. One was of a place too personal to get across without betraying its intimacy, though I tried – shredding and reassembling it, blowing it up very large, slashing it into strips dangled with reflective materials, until, at last, the photographic image was unnecessary. Everything unsayable about that image is whispered by these simple wafting strips, alive in a way the photo couldn’t be. It reminds me how the past continues in us, never held still.
Maybe any meaning outside your/my experience of this work is irrelevant. There is this: material responding to the slightest shifts in light and air, returning me again and again to here, where I live.”
*My studio sign took root with poet Fernando Pessoa, his voice a tonic as Alberto Caeiro, in The Keeper of Sheep, which I read in translations (and my favourite, a transélation** by poet Erin Mouré as Eirin Moure). I paraphrased my title from the Edwin Honig/Susan M. Brown version.
**Eirin Moure, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person, Toronto: Anansi Press, 2001 and Fernando Pessoa, The Keeper of Sheep (O Guardador de Rebanhos), Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, translators. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NewYork: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1971.
The Gallery thanks SODEC for its support.
Please visit the gallery website for more information, detailed images of the works presented and installation views.
Universal Cobra – Book Release and Signing
Shary Boyle will be at Feheley Fine Arts to celebrate and sign a new book on February 6th, 2016. Universal Cobra is a limited edition, full-colour companion book to the collaborative exhibition between Shary Boyle and Shuvinai Ashoona. The exhibition, organized jointly by Feheley Fine Arts and Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain previewed in Toronto in October and was exhibited in Montreal in late 2015. A selection of the drawings by both artists will be on view during the month of February.
