Pass it on

Group Exhibition
Galerie D’Este, Montreal QC
Fev. 28 – March 29, 2015

“Pass It On” presents the work of three young Montreal-based artists whose works privilege the transmission of practical knowledge through apprenticeship, focusing on process, oral history and lived experience. The show recognizes a move away from the academic narrative of linear progress, deconstruction and juxtaposition. The images and objects themselves trace the thread of the artists’ research into lived tradition.

In this context, the work enacts the way individuals negotiate inherited knowledge. There is sincere intent to honour tradition in the spirit of creative continuity. Each of them leaves space in her work for existing narratives, for documentation, and for learning by example, while holding onto the essence and creating their own visual language. Instead of interpreting a subject hermeneutically, the artists infiltrate traditional forms without appropriating them entirely. It is rigorously research-based, but they have found a permeability that counters the perception that traditional forms are limiting and learned by rote.

Véronique La Perrière M.’s multidisciplinary practice explores the urge to catalogue and document, explicitly comparing it to the methodology of alchemy, of secret transformational knowledge being passed down from master to apprentice. She reveals the magical origins of the scientific method, and explores the implications of an objectivity that isn’t.

Marigold Santos telescopes oral history and the conception of home into the creation of personal myth in her multidisciplinary work, which often includes things being where they should not be. Accretion, hybridization and the creation of systems inform her current practice, centering on the process-based magic of creating talismans as protective objects and to mark boundaries.

Invited artist Joani Tremblay combines drawing, embroidery, and printmaking techniques in sparse, fragmented landscapes on paper influenced by neo-ornamentalism. Her recent work explores the power of places of mystical or ritual significance. Compositions are created through the accumulation of data drawn from elements of the landscape, such as the pattern of moss and minerals, and are executed with inks made with ground minerals and natural elements.