Ed Pien, Corridor (detail), 2009, installation, courtesy of the artist and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal

Ed Pien, Corridor (detail), 2009, installation, courtesy of the artist and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal

Jérôme Havre, Sans titre, séries hybride 3, 2008

Fibred Optics features four artists whose work incorporates natural and synthetic fibres, old and new technologies, and methodologies from the world of craft and contemporary art. Produced through laborious processes of knotting, stitching, and weaving, the work in this exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the ways in which multi-sensory information can be sutured and layered to produce meaning about the worlds we inhabit. Each artist uses fibre–a three-dimensional, quotidian material–to produce and transmit individual and collective narratives that are at once coherent and fragmented, visible and invisible.

Frances Dorsey works with textile as a way to weave together personal memories and marginalized histories, thus illuminating local and global concerns. According to curator Ingrid Jenkner, her large-scale, landscape-like works are "an extended intermediation of continued fragmentation and imaginative reconstruction in which memory, as opposed to history, rings true as the unauthorized version of events."¹

Jérôme Havre’s toy-like, soft-nylon mythical sculptures are reminiscent of Yinka Shonibare’s aliens. They encourage the viewer to reflect on the 'us' and 'them' divide, acts of suturing, as well as processes of synthesis and hybridity. Constructed from ropes, video, and drawing, Ed Pien’s walkthrough installation The Corridor (2009) creates a sense of movement, journey, containment and exchange. Comprised of two net-like curtains of knotted and layered coloured rope, the installation transforms spectators into participants as they journey through its network.

Michèle Provost’s ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS humorously converts writing from art magazines and curatorial essays into visual art. By painstakingly appropriating texts from their original sources, and meticulously stitching and stamping the borrowed textual codes on to fabric and paper, Provost creates Dadaist visual and sound poetry that begs the viewer to consider how coherence is produced in an era of globalization.

– Andrea Fatona, Exhibition Curator

¹ Ingrid Jenkner, Frances Dorsey: Saigon (Halifax, Nova Scotia: MSVU Art Gallery, 2007), p. 22.

Events

Opening
Thursday 26 November at 5:30 pm

Talk with artist Jérôme Havre (in French)
Friday 27 November at 12:30 pm

Family Workshop with artist Jérôme Havre (in French and English)
Saturday 28 November at 1 pm - 4 pm

Exhibition tour with curator Andrea Fatona (in English)
Friday 4 December at 12:30 pm

Sound Poetry Evening: Local poets and writers perform works inspired by words from Michèle Provost’s installation ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS
Thursday 28 January at 7 pm