GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_
The Studio
Exhibition with works by artist Monique Fouquet
Exhibition
October 3 - October 29, 2024
Opening Reception
Thursday, October 3, 2024 from 6 - 9pm
Artist Talk
Monique Fouquet in conversation with Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig
Saturday, October 12, 2024 from 2 - 3pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Many years ago, Monique Fouquet recalls looking through a glass wall at Brancusi’s reconstructed studio located at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Brancusi considered the relationship between sculptures and the space they occupied to be of crucial importance. When he bequeathed his entire studio to the French state, he stipulated that its reconstruction at a new site had to display his sculptures in their exact location at the time of his death. The studio, in effect, became a work of art.
In Fouquet’s studio, objects such as notebooks, art materials, books, family heirlooms, and other items, either purposefully collected, or haphazardly accumulated meld into the background. In a home studio, boundaries can be ambiguous. It is in fact, the visibility of works-in-progress that here cover the walls and which transforms domestic space into conquered territory. As transitional space and space of uncertainty, the studio is also a place of unpredictable connections.
On the studio walls, a series of drawings suggesting space, movement and time coalesce in abstractions where imaginary boundaries could potentially extend beyond the edges of the paper. The objects which, moments ago, sat imperceptibly on shelves thus become part of a new register. This shift of context, from background to foreground, calls attention to materiality and to social relations.
As an experiment, Fouquet isolates and photographs objects, a process that gradually leads to building an inventory from which images are selected to construct still life compositions in dynamic relation to each digitized drawing. Historically, still life paintings or drawings occupy commonplace settings like a table top. But here, it is the objects’ placement over the drawing that determines the illusory surface onto which the objects sit. The series renders visible, not only the accumulation of things, but also the incongruous relationships that are suggested in the process of juxtaposition.
In this project, Fouquet aims for a fluid relationship between the photographic representation of the objects and the abstraction of the drawings. Objects make connections. Books, an old camera, porcelain vases, a bottle of black acrylic paint and other effects, though personal to the artist, are assembled and underscore the dialectical interplay between the artist’s intent, the viewer’s perception and the social sphere.
The Studio invites viewers to engage on a personal level and to consider the interconnectedness of disparate components in both, art and life, while contemplating the possibility of multiple meanings and the reinterpretation of historical traditions to allow for more poetic associations.
ARTIST BIO
Monique Fouquet was born in Quebec City and now lives in Vancouver - Unceeded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territory.
She holds an MFA (Simon Fraser University) and a PhD in Curriculum Studies (The University of British Columbia). She taught at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and served as Vice President Academic and Provost 2002-2011.
She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Asia including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the Yokohama Citizen Gallery among others. She has served on the Vancouver Public Art Committee 2018-2021, 2020-2021 (Chair).
Her work is included in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Vancouver General Hospital and in numerous private collections in Canada and the United States.