48″x60″; archival inkjet print; 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Flotsam: Celia Perrin Sidarous
at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
11 February-13 March 2021
Danielle St-Amour wrote about this work for the gallery in January 2021:
We are following a trail of something familiar, a collection of increasingly inward looks compelled by exterior consequences–a gesture, a marble, a mirror, a colour, something we read. The resulting tilts of perspective buoy, cast or recast our memories. The language of this process is the knotted, scrutable, always economical, language of Things. This language’s diacritics are temporal. It vibrates in preternatural concord with the autonomy of its speakers. Some of us speak it fluently. It is not deterministic.
28″x36″; archival inkjet print; 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran.
The trail is not static and it is not a record–it is a combination of arrangement, pressure and intuition, inflected by time. We know about time, sitting and looking at what’s been washing up from our lives and others. We also might attempt a kind of -mancy with what’s found. How to hold it. How to preen it. Or wield it. For how long. Hydromancy. Amathomancy. Some of us are Mancers.
If these compulsions are temporary, they are also agglutinative. They compose, leak into and onto one another when they liaise on a surface. Time binds them together, forming a present tense from a series of past notes to self, intending to draw the memory back to a dulling marker, to pull up the rope and disentangle the jetsam from the net. These notes are both personal and im-; they are on purpose. Breadcrumbs. A map. They are also (like their capture) carefully eventually, unmaking themselves.
There is something else here. Previously deemed derelict, maybe mistaken for something else, noise, fog, murk, mollusks. A dredging here of what’s always been there. Submerged things are gathering places for sea moss, sea weed, brightly colored comb clips, a wide hinge like a joint, a clam, a translucent ghost or a string of bubbles, pearls from a round orifice-come-live. By gathering on an erosive surface they become evocative. Remember. Object is a natal tongue; a tongue a cork jacket. We got here by floating.
Works by Montreal-based artist Celia Perrin Sidarous have been featured
in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including the McCord Museum and Centre CLARK in Montreal; the Embassy of Canada in Japan; Norsk Billedhoggerforening in Oslo, as well as galleries and festivals in Banff, Calgary, Mumbai, New York, Quebec City, Regina, and Toronto. Her work was also included in the Biennale de Montréal 2016: Le Grand Balcon at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2019, and is the recipient of the Prix Pierre-Ayot 2017, as well as the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award 2011. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, most notably the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
(text adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Bradley Ertaskiran
3550 Saint-Antoine Street West
Montreal, Quebec H4C 1A9 Canada
(514) 989-1056
HOURS
Contact the gallery by email or visit the website for more information.