Clint Roenisch Gallery

Sarah Cale, Chris Cran, Catherine Carmichael, Jason de Haan, Dorian FitzGerald, Heather Goodchild, Jerôme Havre, Harold Klunder, John Massey, Niall McClelland, Studio Morison, Jennifer Murphy, Jon Sasaki, Margaux Smith, Anna Torma, Marcel van Eeden, Winsom Winsom

For this edition of Plural, CRG is pleased to anchor our booth with a monumental work of lens-based architectural bricolage by Jasmin Bilodeau (b. 1973, Lac Megantic, lives Quebec). Bilodeau is primarily known as one of the three founding members of the artist collective BGL, alongside Sébastien Giguère (b. 1972) and Nicolas Laverdière (b. 1972). He began his solo career in 2021. During a residency at VU, the Montreal artist-run centre for the production and diffusion of photography, Bilodeau produced four large works of fictitious facades, a cinema, a hardware store, an electronics shop and a convenience store, each hand-made and each with a distinct atmosphere, all of them printed at real architectural scale. The works pay homage to the spirit of resourcefulness known in Quebec as "patenteux". Close inspection reveals many ingenious decisions Bilodeau made to evoke a certain aspect, such as painted leaves or falling rain, or surfaces that seem to be older and more weathered than they truly are. The works also foreground the quagmire of our current post-truth era where images that were once taken as fact now often need to be questioned on their authenticity.

Complimenting Bilodeau's images are works by the acclaimed Canadian artist John Massey (b. 1950, lives Toronto) and the Hungarian-Canadian textile artist, Anna Torma (b. 1943, lives Baie-Verte, NB). As with Bilodeau, Massey's recent series, Red White & Blue, also traffic in ambiguity and elusiveness. Greg Burke, former director of the Power Plant and the Remai Modern, writing in the catalogue essay: "John Massey's projects are frequently linked to the camera, and to photo-conceptualism. Even if, in recent years, he has consummately embraced the possibilities of digital manipulation, the resulting images have been in their final form photomechanically produced and are thereby reproducible as editions. While this latest project, titled RED WHITE & BLUE continues to construct works digitally, the final stage of the process involves the manual application of paint to sections of the surface, which in turn dominate the image and hit the eye with astonishing force. This use of paint ostensibly represents a jump in Massey's practice, in that it both transforms the image into a photo-digital and painted amalgam and also produces a unique image that cannot be reproduced. Coupled with this jump is the direct manipulation of pre-existing artworks, albeit 19th century editioned engravings that are themselves stylized interpretations of paintings in European museum collections. Previous projects have exploited canonical works from art's history to Massey's own ends, but never before has he so emphatically sequestered and radically deformed an existing image."

Anna Torma is widely recognized for her astonishing textiles. We are pleased to include here a work from her Pedagogical Charts series. She says: "My works are textile objects, embroidered by hand. I often use a linen base and silk threads; the best materials to complete fine needleworks. Usually there are strong narrative elements with darker undertones dominating the surface. I work with the idea of Dionysian feelings, portraying male and female figures interlaced by real and imagined vegetation, suggesting connectedness in an earthly microcosm. I also want to show the enjoyment and appreciation of myths and legends of different races, sexual preferences, flowers, fruits, colours, living and imagined creatures, seeing the environment and human identity as a whole but fragile and ever-changing subject." James Campbell, reviewing Torma for White Hot Magazine, rightly notes that Torma is "influenced by artists as diverse as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kiki Smith and her own partner, the sculptor István Zsakó, Torma’s visual language is raw, expressive and experimental. One might also call it elemental. She brings a maverick vision to works that have varying levels of accessibility and multiple entry-points. Stitching the wisdom and wherewithal of a life lived into her compositions, she offers her viewers an experience that can be profoundly moving. Her night thoughts and surreal juxtapositions yield a sense of the uncanny and unforeseen."