Jean Van Wijk, Le Matin, 2005
COMMON GROUND | YVONNE LAMMERICH, NICHOLAS WADE, JEAN VAN WIJK
06.26.2008 | 09.07.2008
The exhibition Common Ground is the result of collaboration among three artists who live and work in different locations, but approach their practices through strategies that link their production to architecture. They have in common an interest in our built environment and how we negotiate our passage through time and space.
Toronto artist Yvonne Lammerich’s work speaks to the complexity inherent in the exploration of architectural space creating a language which defies epistemological constructs. She is specifically interested in illusion as defined by materiality and consciousness. Through her practice, Lammerich articulates a paradigm shift in the way we become aware of how the senses, including non-visual senses, define aesthetic experience. She has remarked there are moments when I am only aware of the sound of the world in rotation: our silence. Lammerich has exhibited her work across Canada and Europe. In 1996 she was awarded the Maria Stafford Mid-Career Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts. She is currently completing a Ph.D in art history at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal. Her work is represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary.
Jean van Wijk maintains his studio in The Hague, Netherlands. His work considers architectural space as a social construct. Imagination leads him to create new realities from everyday subjects and objects. As an artist he is fascinated with the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, and their varying interfaces: the human organic skin and senses juxtaposed with the constructed architectural skin, including language especially in its canonical forms. Using various techniques, in his recent work he explores basic elements of architectural space by way of imaginary models. Jean van Wijk has completed a number of commissioned projects in relation to the public realm and architecture. He has shown his work across the Netherlands, and in Paris and New York. He recently received the Heden prize at the city of The Hague in recognition of his practice.
Nicholas Wade lives and works in Lethbridge. He is interested in the bodily and emotional effects of the spaces which we commonly occupy and surround ourselves. In his sculpture, he responds to ways that materials hold spaces and, reciprocally, how spaces hold materials. Wade comments: Moving through and between spaces in familiar and unfamiliar environments stimulates transformation and self-realization in childhood. These possibilities are further from our reach in adult life as we engage in architectures of necessity and distraction while places and spaces continue to move through us. Nicholas Wade has exhibited his work across Canada. He received his MFA from the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in 1981. He has taught art at Queen’s University, Brock University, Tyler School of Art, David Thompson University Centre, NSCAD and since 1994, The University of Lethbridge.
Common Ground is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and curated by Joan Stebbins. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge.
