Gabrièle Fontana: “I am the heads I come across”
23 March-29 April 2017
Swiss-born Montréal artist Gabrièle Fontana, working with collage and mixed media, has created 375 small portrait works especially for this exhibition. The installation blankets the gallery with a grid of fantastic characters of all type and sentiment. Each work is both an individual and part of a whole. Fontana sees each face as part of herself, and part someone she has come across in life.
Gabrièle Fontana says about the work:
This project starts with a memory. Night train between Geneva and Amsterdam, long ago. The outside world is absent. Alone in a compartment, my face endlessly reflected in the windowpanes. The same. The same. The same. Smothering. I need a way out, right away, to another. The Other. Its difference will save me from confinement. It’s then everything started.
I try to recall the faces I’ve encountered throughout my life. They’re inscribed some place in me. A diffuse impression, superimposed impressions, an abundance of impressions: dizzying. Face to face. Chalk faces traced in earth; whisperings of living matter. Wailing of mute matter. Bare faces, skin, hair, horns. Man and beast intertwined. Headdresses, finery, ceremonial masks. Whitened skin. Black-rimmed, blushing red, the eyes, the mouth are excessive. Cross-dressed faces. Him or her? He and she. From Madagascar to Stockholm, from Bombay to New York, the faces of the world travel through time toward me. (Translation: Karen I. Ocana)
(Text adapted from the gallery’s press materials.)
INFORMATION
Ymuno Exhibitions
Belgo #530
372 Sainte-Catherine Street West
Montreal, Quebec H3B 1A2 Canada
(514) 271-7733
Hours:
Thursday-Saturday, 1-5PM
Image:
From “I am the heads I come across”
by Gabrièle Fontana