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Item Ships From: Canada
Harmonic Overlay
By Franco DeFrancesca
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Resin coated and mounted to layers of plywood, these digital/mixed media ‘picture objects’ represent interpretations of contemporary visual culture charmed by minimalism, modernism, technology and futurism. Recalling the colour-field and the elemental geometry of mid to late twentieth century post painterly abstraction, minimalism and op-art, these works use digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting, mixing references to photography, painting and television display technology. Visualizing ephemeral and elusive environments of light, air, fission and liquid...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Resin, Panel, Digital Pigment

Syncopated Interval
By Franco DeFrancesca
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Resin coated and mounted to layers of plywood, these digital/mixed media ‘picture objects’ represent interpretations of contemporary visual culture charmed by minimalism, modernism, technology and futurism. Recalling the colour-field and the elemental geometry of mid to late twentieth century post painterly abstraction, minimalism and op-art, these works use digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting, mixing references to photography, painting and television display technology. Visualizing ephemeral and elusive environments of light, air, fission and liquid...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Resin, Panel, Digital Pigment

Suspension
By Franco DeFrancesca
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Resin coated and mounted to layers of plywood, these digital/mixed media ‘picture objects’ represent interpretations of contemporary visual culture charmed by minimalism, modernism, technology and futurism. Recalling the colour-field and the elemental geometry of mid to late twentieth century post painterly abstraction, minimalism and op-art, these works use digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting, mixing references to photography, painting and television display technology. Visualizing ephemeral and elusive environments of light, air, fission and liquid...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Resin, Panel, Digital Pigment

Burst
By Franco DeFrancesca
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Resin coated and mounted to layers of plywood, these digital/mixed media ‘picture objects’ represent interpretations of contemporary visual culture charmed by minimalism, modernism, technology and futurism. Recalling the colour-field and the elemental geometry of mid to late twentieth century post painterly abstraction, minimalism and op-art, these works use digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting, mixing references to photography, painting and television display technology. Visualizing ephemeral and elusive environments of light, air, fission and liquid...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Resin, Panel, Digital Pigment

Where desert and ocean meet, Mixed Media on Canvas
By Andrada Anghel
Located in Yardley, PA
- Title: Where desert and ocean meet - Medium: Mixed media, textured - Support: canvas, ready to hang - Size: 24"x48"x1.5" - Two coats of protective gloss varnish are applied to ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Drawing in Water
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Trophy
By Rachel Ovadia
Located in Montreal, Quebec
There is rarely any forward planning, materials and choices are made randomly, colors and mediums are selected in accordance with the needs of what transpires at the moment. At times...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Infinity Series #4
By Rachel Ovadia
Located in Montreal, Quebec
There is rarely any forward planning, materials and choices are made randomly, colors and mediums are selected in accordance with the needs of what transpires at the moment. At times...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Chasing beauty, Mixed Media on Canvas
By Andrada Anghel
Located in Yardley, PA
Textured painting, stunning in real life, gorgeous small details (see the pictures) This series of paintings are an exploration of textures and colors. The random effects and strong...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Captain Cook’s Legacy
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Winston (AM416)
By André Monet
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Inspired by cinema, photography, music and literature, Monet has a natural connection and sense for the current society and his contemporaries. His signature conceptual assemblage of...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media, Panel

Of the return voyage...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Of the return voyage there is nothing to tell… In 1912 all the world learned that the brave Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole; and then, much l...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Eight Adélie Penguins...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Eight Adélie Penguins immediately came to greet us … They insisted on us going to visit Hut Point, where the large structure built by Captain Scott’s pa...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Bee (Lucio Fontana slash oil painting abstract contemporary impasto yellow art)
By Lucas Biagini
Located in Quebec, Quebec
keywords; materiality, texture, oil painting, contemporary painting, ooze, perforation, Lucio Fontana, process-based, repetition, abstract painting, patterns, impasto, yellow, bee, p...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Acrylic, Wood Panel, Oil

Winter arrangment, Mixed Media on Canvas
By Julia Hacker
Located in Yardley, PA
Inspired by the original Joan Mitchel's abstract paintings, this artwork is my reflection of a winter flower arrangement. Just like Joan Mitchel, my in...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Expressionist Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Cascadia 8 (grid painting abstract wood contemporary vivid colors optical art)
By Melisa Taylor Metzger
Located in Quebec, Quebec
In Melisa’s optical and pulsating compositions, the natural world acts as blue-print while she explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. The artist develops an a...
Category

2010s Op Art Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Spray Paint, Wood Panel

Exposed as our camp...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Exposed as our camp was to every wind, we built no rigid structures above ground. We set up tents to shelter in while we dug a series of cubicles in the ice itself.” Over the Edge ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Dolce
By Rachel Ovadia
Located in Montreal, Quebec
There is rarely any forward planning, materials and choices are made randomly, colors and mediums are selected in accordance with the needs of what transpires at the moment. At times...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

We were sledgehaulers
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Leonard Cohen (AM418)
By André Monet
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Inspired by cinema, photography, music and literature, Monet has a natural connection and sense for the current society and his contemporaries. His signature conceptual assemblage of...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media, Panel

Screen tbd2 (abstract grid wood painting contemporary neutrals natural motifs)
By Melisa Taylor Metzger
Located in Quebec, Quebec
In Melisa’s optical and pulsating compositions, the natural world acts as blue-print while she explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. The artist develops an a...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Spray Paint, Wood Panel

Aerial Exploration
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Inextricably Linked
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Polar Opposites and Complementary Relationship
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Ghost in the Land
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Action Which Enables Us to Project Our Forces Into the Outside World
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Fatigue of the Conquest
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Between Them
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

If the Two Realities Are Thus Brought Together
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Impossible Abyss Which Separates the Two Sides
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Both Above and Below
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The nine of us worked things out...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The steam from our own small funnel
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

instead of a narrow bight...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

we came in sight of the Barrier...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

When I was little more...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“When I was little more than a child my imagination was caught by a newspaper account of the voyage of the Belgica…” Over the Edge of the World locates itself in the entangled lega...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Wood Panel, Oil

Screen tbd7 (abstract grid wood painting contemporary gold natural motifs)
By Melisa Taylor Metzger
Located in Quebec, Quebec
In Melisa’s optical and pulsating compositions, the natural world acts as blue-print while she explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. The artist develops an a...
Category

2010s Abstract Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Spray Paint, Wood Panel

Fluid Ocean, Mixed Media on Canvas
By Alexandra Romano
Located in Yardley, PA
Bold abstract painting with a refreshing color scheme and fierce movement. The turquoise background gives off a fresh summery feel with expressive details throughout the piece. Metal...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

There Remains and Irreducible Parity
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

A Balancing Land
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Around Us and Within Us
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Holding Up and Attracting the Earth
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Compass Rose
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Of a Difference in Which the Differences Are Inseparable
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Heart World
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Taking Place
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Footprints
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

She dug out one more cell...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“She dug out one more cell just under the ice surface, leaving nearly a transparent sheet of ice like a greenhouse roof; and there, alone, she worked at sculptures...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The little Yelcho
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

…last Thule of the South
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
"…last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, suppositious islands, headlan...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

A summary report...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“A SUMMARY REPORT OF THE YELCHO EXPEDITION TO THE ANTARCTIC, 1909-1910. Although I have no intention of publishing this report, I think it would be nice if a grandchild of mine, or somebody’s grandchild, happened to find it some day; so I shall keep it in the leather trunk in the attic, along with Rosita’s christening dress and Juanito’s silver rattle and my wedding shoes...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

But then, the backside...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“But then, the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that …But the achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Forward March Loses Ground
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

The Second Flight
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

They Surveyed the Mountain Peak as a Philosophical
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Launching Strategy
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Into Mystery Land
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

The Plume of Nationalism
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Canada - Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

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