pictures, news, and reviews from the Visual Voice Art Gallery, Montreal

For one week only Jennifer Hamilton will exhibit her latest series of paintings titled “More than Words”. Her home and studio on 555 de Gaspé may be down for business (read about her adventures here, here, and here), but this intrepid artist is still going full steam ahead!

Vernissage: Thursday, July 22, 2010
Exhibition run: July 20 – 24, 2010

See her page on the gallery’s website here.

Bernice Sorge
Where to Here ? and Where I was…. The Urban Trace
June 17th – 27th, 2010

Bernice Sorge is an artist dedicated to expressing and using the media of life and she does so with an ongoing curiosity about the diversity of materials she uses. These material elements can range from leaves, to organic soil making piles, to the architecture of the city, to the her own body. Nature’s cyclical processes of birth, life, death and decay are hinted at in the challenging new series of prints she has been working on during an ELAN sponsored residence at the Atelier Circulaire in Montreal. One such large-scale colour digital print on Hahnemulle paper has a quote from Charles Darwin in the 19th century that reads, “All of the fertile areas of this planet have passed at least once through the bodies of earthworms.” The shadow image of the artist’s own body present a kind of anima image. This anima body form is layered over an image of a wide range of organic refuse. The immediate impression of this beautiful nature-inspired testament to recycling in today’s world, is of those anthropomorphized portraits made by Italian artist Arcimboldo out of a range of fruit and plants centuries ago. And the shadows remind us of photographer Lee Friedlander’s on the road portraits, where the photographer’s presence is the shadow in each photograph. Sorge does the same but here it is on earth, on the vegetal, instead of the shop or motel window, or the concrete sidewalk.
Coming from the “Green Zone” as she refers to the rural, out of city regions of our times, Bernice Sorge, has had a long and dedicated career teaching art and   sensitizing people to creativity as a practise that can free oneself up from inner turmoil’s, or the difficulties adapting to the stress of life these days. Art becomes a medium of change, and of exchange of self with the external world. The resulting art is the bridge between oneself and the community.
A hunter gatherer of nature by choice  Bernice Sorge  uses nature as her medium drawn from life. Whether threatened or transformed or in context, nature is a link to our past history of human experience. The body itself is a landscape, and a leaf is likewise a living system, and any given element becomes a non-place where an ethnology of the spirit takes place. Prints from plants establish a nature context and become exercises in expressing the diversity of garden, forest and field species that surround her atelier.
Nature is not a subject, nor an object, but a process we delve into and move through, Bernice Sorge`s art intuits. Her latest artworks, produced in the Montreal urban context, innovate with digital printing, and are a breakthrough in her mixed media technique. The new works combine digital printing on rice paper with drawing, photography, painting, and use Adobe photoshop for fine-tuning. The result is a series of very colourful, vivid multi-layered printworks. One of these works on paper has the topical quote “If we made more soil we wouldn’t need so much oil.” Still another combines photo imagery of the Birks Building on Ste. Catherine St. West, but this time it has a horse of a different colour on its roof!
With 30 years experience composting in the Eastern Townships near Dunham,
Bernice Sorge has now caught the spirit of recycling fibrose and organic materials and transposed it into her art-making practise. As such she addresses the themes of our times, notably sustainability, recycling, and finding ways of reusing resources in innovative ways. Now instead of becoming landfill, the organics from your tabletop that were not consumed, have a way of becoming art. Food becomes art and vice versa. What you eat you are, and what you are,  can be seen in those human shadow images, some even replete with melons in the new printworks on view at Galerie d’art contemporain Visual Voice.  Bernice Sorge’s latest experiments with the new digital media adapt her print techniques and take it all a step further, and in a less toxic way than traditional printmaking did. Landfill lives, but move over to make room for some art!

- John K. Grande

John K. Grande’s  Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream was published by Pari Publishing (Italy) in 2007. His most recent books include The Landscape Changes (Prospect/Gaspereau Press, 2009) and Natura Humana – Bob Verschueren, Editions Mardaga, Belgium, 2010).  He is Curator emeritus of Earth Art at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. www.grandescritique.com

Stark warehouse fronts, crumbling brick walls, and the sharp horizontal lines of timber clad homes come to life in the dramatically atmospheric series of photographs by JB Valiquette titled De Nuit. On display until the end of this week at the Visual Voice Art Gallery, this young photographer’s work betrays his studies and deep understanding of urbanism. Inspired by the New Topographics movement, Valiquette photographed a myriad of Montreal’s commercial buildings by night. The banal structures we may pass by day without giving them a second glance are transformed by the artist into moody studies of geometry, reminiscent of colour field paintings. The dark, dense monochromes reveal hollow doorways, ravaged window panes, and rusty gates. The silence of the city at night is palpable. Long shadows are cast on the white canvas of a building’s wall, the red smear of the tail lights of an invisible passing car provide the only clue of human presence. The night sky ranges from an inky, cloudless blue to the orange glow of city lights reflected back by an overcast sky.
This is a love letter to our city, and proof that a good artist can reveal the beauty of the most mundane objects.

(from the Belgo Report)

Philippe Chevrette’s exhibition garnered a mention on Nicolas Mavrikakis‘ blog on Voir

http://bit.ly/acOiAH

It was a full house on Saturday afternoon at Visual Voice as Montrealers braved the cold to swing by Jimmy Deschênes‘ vernissage. Thank you all for stopping by. The Formes Libres exhibition will continue until Saturday, April 17, 2010.

The exhibition has been reviewed:

Le Vadrouilleur urbain
Jimmy Deschênes l’artiste révisioniste

Les découvertes de Pascale
Jimmy Deschênes – Artiste sculpteur qui a du talent!