Vida Simon ELLE MARCHE blue mountain
© P. Barry, 2012
Opening on Saturday, November 10 at 5 pm
Furtive interventions in the gallery from November 10 – 23
Performance on Saturday, November 24, from 1-4:30 pm (ongoing, public can go in and out)
In the gallery, the natural elements that have underpinned Vida Simon’s work for many years come to the foreground. Through various treatments, calling on performance, drawing and installation, the artist establishes a relationship of proximity and distance to these elements. Working out of a study room resembling a Dutch interior, the curator and the artist develop a botanical fiction, hanging and dismantling the backdrop of an unfolding narrative.
Referring to handbooks, they note their observations, weighing, considering and turning over inscrutable specimens: piles of seaweed, fruit, litter, paper, moss are classified as downy, wrinkled, glossy, viscous. They focus on “ways of seeing” nature, combining various narrative and scientific filters through which they consider their samples. They sketch, peel, make marks on the spot.
Yet, the amalgam of specimens on the table, forming a cardboard decor, a shadow play, divulge an excessive presence. Beyond the tools, methods, stories, it is clear that something is showing itself. Is it possible, even if only for an instant, to simultaneously grasp the story’s thread, its mesh and what throbs beneath?
Further readings:
© P. Barry, 2012
Vida Simon’s work has been presented internationally, in a wide range of contexts – galleries, hotel rooms, storefronts, theatres, rooftops, a former synagogue, an old horse stable, and most recently in an abandoned house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland with TO MAKE ENDS MEET (2013). Other recent projects include performances at the ZAZ Festival of Performance Art (Israel), Interakcje (Poland), a collaboration with Jack Stanley at At Home Gallery (Slovakia), and exhibitions at OBORO (Montreal) and Badstrasse (Germany).
Caroline Loncol Daigneault is an author, researcher and artist who has followed Vida Simon’s work since 2003, from Montreal to the Laurentians to Newfoundland. She studied visual arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and art history at the Université de Montréal, and holds a master’s degree in art history from UQÀM on the problematics of environmental art in Québec with the Boréal Art/Nature centre in the Laurentians as case study.
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012
ELLE MARCHE blue mountain, Vida Simon – Photos : Paul Litherland, 2012