Growth
2018 I NICOLAS BAIER, PAUL BUTLER, PATRICK COUTU, MYRIAM DION, MICHAEL DUMONTIER & NEIL FARBER, SIMON HUGHES, SARAH ANNE JOHNSON, SCOTT McFARLAND, JULIE ROCH-CUERRIER
GROWTH
MONTREAL
July 7 - Sept 8
Sarah Anne Johnson, Electric Tree, 2018, Pigment print with spray, 62” x 42”
GROWTH
July 7 - Sept 8, 2018
Galerie Division is pleased to present Growth , a summer group exhibition examining the fertile theme in relation to art, economics, science, technology, and family. Ten artists present work, including invited guest, Julie Roch-Cuerrier.
Julie Roch-Cuerrier
Julie Roch-Cuerrier's grandmother commemorated her birth by planting a tree in the family garden. Poignantly, it was stricken by blight the year the matriarch passed away. Having excavated and immortalized its roots, the artist has made both an elegy to her relative and a fossil-like measurement of her own life lived.
Scott McFarland
Like Roch-Cuerrier, McFarland discovered the subject for one of his most recognizable pieces, Spirea prunifolia , Bridal Wreath with Effects of Sunlight, in a garden behind his home. The white blooms, filmed just after his own baby’s birth, became a marker of his family’s growth and a rumination on the passage of time on either side of the lens. This new video examines similar annuals at a local school, where budding minds extend the flowers’ symbolism.
Simon Hughes
Simon Hughes’s epic polyptych brings to mind Renaissance altarpieces and the Aurora Borealis paintings of Frederic Edwin Church. It functions as a Bosch-like vision of our environmental moment, skewering our worship of consumption and emphasizing the perils of unchecked growth.
Sarah Anne Johnson
Pushing beyond the limits of her camera, Sarah Anne Johnson applies gold leaf, paint and glitter to her photographs, augmenting her subjects with the resplendent distortion of memory. The artist makes her reverence for nature felt in these three flora-themed works, the bushes, trees and foliage emitting auras like those of powerful gods, or perhaps vanishing spirits.
Patrick Coutu
Patrick Coutu’s sculptures not only represent growth, but are themselves grown, first virtually as software-generated forms, then physically in bronze. These delicate new pieces, derived from mathematical equations, rendered in 3-D printers, and hewn in noble metal, paint a poetic vision of cosmic expansion.
Nicolas Baier
Baier’s Connectifs 2D is an overgrown garden of networks and tendrils. The complex image suggests nature and technology vying for space in a finite world, a delicate symbiosis at the margins of our control.
Myriam Dion
As click-bait proliferates, Myriam Dion’s finely cut collages espouse the virtues of unhurried journalism and patient craft. Fashioned into intricate abstraction, her filigreed newsprint becomes both message and medium, alerting us to vanishing reefs and displaced peoples, but also to our imperiled free press. The two pieces in this exhibition explore how commercial and environmental interests, often in conflict with one another, inform a nation’s idea of progress and of self.
Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber
If poets and existential philosophers hijacked the self-help section at Barnes & Noble, the result might be the pithy, profoundly introspective writings of Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. Themes of personal growth permeate their work and the floral paintings in this exhibition make poignant metaphors of the lives of flowers.
Paul Butler
Slung with breezy palm trees, and imploring us to “Take It Easy” , Paul Butler’s sunny collage reads like a motivational poster on Quaaludes. But what if there were wisdom behind the shrug? Read in the face of recent political unrest, as technology overwhelms us and globalization curdles into the rancor of nationalism and protectionism, Butler’s piece is at once a slacker slogan and an appeal to cooler heads.
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