Luanne Martineau
January 14th to March14th, 2015
Artist
Luanne Martineau, assisted by Geneviève Moisan
Opening Reception
Wednesday, January 14, 5 to 7 pm.
Curator
Vicky Chainey Gagnon and Karine Di Genova
Overview
The Foreman Art Gallery is pleased to present this exhibition, featuring the work of artist Luanne Martineau as part of the New Voices series, which presents her most recent work. Combining various methods of craft with the legacies of 1950s and 1960s contemporary art, Martineau explores the spaces in between art genres, unsettling the boundaries between style and ideology in her enticing and sensual works. The experience of the senses in the artist’s works positions them as objects with overt affect. They invite us to go beyond the initial sensation of the materials (felt, wool, fabric, wood) to grasp their meaningful interconnectedness.
For this exhibition, Martineau has created a new, large-scale textile wall work titled Razzle Dazzle. It brings together a multitude of traditional fibre arts techniques, such as print on textile, cut felt, embroidery and appliqué, in a patchwork of assembly based upon Martineau’s artistic history of “cannibalizing” images and forms from her previous work.
The conversations generated through Martineau’s work bridge genres and movements, such as abstract expressionism, post-minimalism, feminism, popular culture and craft, making them fluid, porous and relevant to current discourse. In breaking down the barriers between figurative/abstract and art/craft, Martineau’s work unpacks the formal and critical underpinnings of art history and traditional female work while also engaging with this history to make up for its omissions.
The Artist and her Assistant
Luanne Martineau is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, with most recent exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Martineau’s work also figures in important private and public art collections across the country.
Geneviève Moisan has recently completed a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art at Concordia University, with a concentration in fibre. Her research focuses on notions of hypermodernity, excessive individuality and urgency, and the connections they weave between people in their way of inhabiting both urban and virtual spaces. Moving between traditional textile techniques and the digital treatment of the photographic image, Moisan uses an electronic Jacquard loom to represent in fabric these complex interpersonal relationships. Her work has been exhibited in Montréal, Venice, Paris and Oaxaca, Mexico. She also works as a research assistant with several Canadian and international artists, including Luanne Martineau, François Morelli and Kelly Thompson, and is a member of the subTela studio-laboratory at Concordia University.
Press Coverage
- Article by Steve Bergeron in La Tribune, January 19, 2015, http://www.lapresse.ca/la-tribune/arts/201501/19/01-4836505-les-contradictions-faites-textiles.php.
Events
“Being on the making side”: An artist talk with Geneviève Moisan
This event has been made possible by the generous support of the Bishop’s Speakers Committee.
