Simon Hughes - The Fire, the Flood and All the Feelings
2024 | SIMON HUGHES
THE FIRE, THE FLOOD AND ALL THE FEELINGS
MONTRÉAL
Nov 21, 2024
Opening : Nov 21, 2024, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Simon Hughes - Evacuation, 2024
Aquarelle et matériaux mixtes sur papier / Watercolour and mixed media on paper,
65” x 42”
Blouin Division is pleased to present The Fire, the Flood and All the Feelings, an exhibition of new works by artist Simon Hughes.
After spending recent years working with various media and formats, Simon Hughes returns to large-scale works on paper, spread across multiple panels. When viewed together, the three pieces in this exhibition form a comprehensive statement on the environmental chaos—both terrifying and beautiful—that represents Western Canada in our time. This new body of work also reflects on the sense of powerlessness felt in the face of these forces, while offering a prolonged meditation on the evolution and language of the landscape. With The Fire, the Flood and All the Feelings, Hughes continues his ongoing dialogue with the history of modernism and the absurd/surreal, key elements of his artistic practice.
Fire is represented by the piece titled Evacuation (2024). This panoramic landscape of an industrial foothill community, still partially wild, evokes Western Canada or Southern California, regions that have been home to Hughes' family. The hills are dotted with suburban residences and other architectural forms; a stretch of big-box stores and fast-food chains runs along the bottom of the composition, accompanied by a flow of vehicles. These vehicles are the only elements in the work not rendered in watercolor, instead pasted onto the paper as found images. The entire landscape is threatened by devastating wildfires and a pair of distant volcanoes, rendered in a palette of bright reds, ochres, and yellows.
The flood is depicted through a characteristic palette found in several earlier works, where the white expanse of the paper serves as a backdrop for floating geometric ice plates set within a murky blue field. In the piece Flood Plain (2024), the land is seen from above and rendered in isometric perspective. The 1997 flooding of Manitoba was caused by the spring thaw of river ice, and as a long-time Winnipegger, Hughes recalls this dangerous landscape of sharply defined forms, sometimes bearing strange debris from the south. A famous photograph of a dead cow on a block of ice became a macabre synecdoche for the collective regional experience. Hughes has explored similar imagery in works like Television Lake (2014), Legends of the Thaw (2024), and Open-Air Museum (2023), and in this new version, partially submerged buildings and landscape elements intermingle with the ice plates, all rendered in color gradients blending into the depths.
The final panorama, Suburban Thought-Form (2024), references a famous series of illustrations accompanying the 1905 book Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, which assigned shapes and colors to human emotions and thought patterns, seen through the spiritual lens of Theosophy. The best-known image in this series depicts a vibrant patch of color rising from a cathedral, representing the energy created by a musical performance. This new work is loosely inspired by the composition of two earlier works, Exurbia Borealis (2011, collection of the National Gallery of Canada) and Life in a Northern Town (2012), reinvented using color and form in new ways, unbound by the overall content of the previous pieces.