Montreal - Sculptures

Meat is not what it used to be. Both chemically (through the over-abundant use of hormones and antibiotics in the raising of livestock,) and conceptually, it has morphed under the ba...

Meat is not what it used to be. Both chemically (through the over-abundant use of hormones and antibiotics in the raising of livestock,) and conceptually, it has morphed under the ba...

In 2015, I made a series of sculptures called "HYPERland" illustrating the utopia promised by the "liberal democracy" and the dystopia that is rather created by the market and financ...

Clint Neufeld makes ethereally beautiful car engines, transmissions, and other mechanical components out of cast ceramic that is decorated and displayed like fine china. In his work,...

Text by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...

Guillaume Lachapelle's artistic practice is shaped predominantly by sculpture, expressed in the form of installations and detailed miniature models. Lachapelle presents playful unive...

Nicholas Crombach is currently an artist in residence at The Florence Trust in London, UK. Crombach graduated from OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation program in 2012. He h...

Clint Neufeld was born and raised in small town Saskatchewan. Prior to pursuing a career in art, Neufeld spent three years with the Canadian military, which included a deployment to ...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Clint Neufeld makes ethereally beautiful car engines, transmissions, and other mechanical components out of cast ceramic that is decorated and displayed like fine china. In his work,...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Brandon Vickerd is a Hamilton based artist and Professor of Sculpture at York University, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Art History. He received ...

In 2015, I made a series of sculptures called "HYPERland" illustrating the utopia promised by the "liberal democracy" and the dystopia that is rather created by the market and financ...

Text by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...

Clint Neufeld makes ethereally beautiful car engines, transmissions, and other mechanical components out of cast ceramic that is decorated and displayed like fine china. In his work,...

Clint Neufeld was born and raised in small town Saskatchewan. Prior to pursuing a career in art, Neufeld spent three years with the Canadian military, which included a deployment to ...

Clint Neufeld makes ethereally beautiful car engines, transmissions, and other mechanical components out of cast ceramic that is decorated and displayed like fine china. In his work,...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Nicholas Crombach graduated from OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation program in 2012. He has been awarded the Hayden Davies Memorial Award, Samuel Lazar Kagan Award, Abraham...

Born in 1983, Karine Payette lives and works in Montreal. As a multidisciplinary artist, her work spans installation, photography, and video. She constructs playful, dreamlike larg...

Text by Nancy Webb It’s Saturday night and Karine Payette is in her studio. We meander into a conversation about the dog she used to have and her soft spot for German shepherds, an intensely obedient and loyal breed in a deceivingly wolf-like package. Payette’s most recent series of photographs, sculptures and video work seem to speak directly to this preoccupation with the multifaceted nature of human-animal relationships—the dialogues of control, intimacy, violence and domestication that subtly take place on an interspecies level. Her workspace is part laboratory, part prop closet—a bowl of fur sits not far from her computer. Somehow in this bright, open, chemical-clean scented room, Payette conjures wildness. We are taken to a strange place, the borderlands of interspecies mingling. At one extreme of the animal-human dynamics scale is the stalwart compliance of a professionally trained German shepherd who responds to commands with robotic precision. Here, power is comfortably held by an off-screen voice, animality pacified by a set of linguistic prompts. At the other end of the scale is a sculpture of a human figure clad in red, sharing a languorous kiss with a wolf. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is immediately called to mind, except that here our hooded protagonist seems to have bailed on grandmother’s orders, instead opting for a forest floor make-out with her canine stalker. This taboo mise-en-scène is a brazen inquiry into the boundaries we maintain with our animal counterparts. Its scale and three-dimensionality contribute to a feeling of immersion that the artist has been courting with her work for the past several years. It feels as though you’ve just walked in on something: you are implicated and your discomfort is like an invisible mist that coats these inanimate beings. Elsewhere in Payette’s suite of anthropomorphic works, the demarcation between species grows even fainter. A photographic series depicts the slow encroachment of fur, scales and feathers on human skin—a striking process of contamination facilitated by touch. The fusion of flesh, charcoal cat fur and a pale silky dress...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Text by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...

Born in 1983, Karine Payette lives and works in Montreal. As a multidisciplinary artist, her work spans installation, photography, and video. She constructs playful, dreamlike larg...

Born in 1983, Karine Payette lives and works in Montreal. As a multidisciplinary artist, her work spans installation, photography, and video. She constructs playful, dreamlike larg...

Working primarily in the medium of installation, but also that of photography and video, Karine Payette creates fictional environments that function as freeze frames in which narratives are suspended. In her work, she uses everyday objects to construct extensive dream-like scenes in a hyperrealist manner. These mises-en-scène serve to hint at a potential narrative which evokes the precariousness of our surrounding world. Through the playful use of everyday objects that are transposed into extraordinary situations, she craftily toys with our vision of things, so as to stimulate reflection about the instability of the materials and forms which are part of our living environments. She questions notions of comfort and displeasure in a perpetually transforming world. Karine Payette, who holds a MFA from UQAM, lives and works in Montreal. Her works have been displayed in solo exhibitions, notably at the Galerie de l’UQAM (Confort instable, 2012) and at Le lieu, Centre en art actuel in Quebec City (L’autre dimanche matin...

Heavily influenced by his extensive background in fabrication, blacksmithing and foundry; Moores’ work is preoccupied by the cultural significance and hierarchical systems of value t...

The Responsibility of Stories: Karine Giboulo’s Broken Circle Text by Sasha Gora Shoulders shrugged, a man stands among row after row of empty single beds. Like the beds, with frames that tilt and mattresses that hang a bit too far to the right, his posture is wobbly, a little unsure. It is hard to tell if he is looking ahead, or if his gaze is cast down. Part of Karine Giboulo’s Broken Circle, the empty beds are haunting as they reference the history of residential schools. The man’s stare suggests the weight of memory, the burden of stories. Giboulo employs sculpture as a mode of storytelling. The Montreal-based artist creates elaborate miniature worlds that are reminiscent of dioramas and ethnographic museum displays. Behind their precious scale and warm colours are harsh observations and critiques of the world’s economic and social ills. For her exhibition at Art Mûr, Giboulo delicately engages with Canada’s broken relationship with First Nations communities. Past projects have brought Giboulo to China (All you can eat, 2008), Haiti (Democracy Village, 2012), and India (City of Dreams, 2013). Back in Canada, Giboulo realized even though she grew up close to the Manawan community, Lanaudière, she had never set foot on a reserve. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released a summary in 2015 that describes the residential school system as cultural genocide. “Cultural” seems to soften the punch; however, cultural genocide is a component to genocide, not a different type. The commission’s head Justice Murray Sinclair states “ . . . this is not an aboriginal problem, it's a Canadian problem." Broken Circle imparts a similar view. This is an installation about Canada...

By Terence Sharpe Attacking the medium of sculpture from a position of almost anti-fine art clarity, Zeke Moores alters conceptions of how we relate to material and form. There is...

Born in 1983, Karine Payette lives and works in Montreal. As a multidisciplinary artist, her work spans installation, photography, and video. She constructs playful, dreamlike larg...

By Sophie Lynch In Hyperobjects, Nova Scotia-based artist Colleen Wolstenholme presents works that developed from her earlier drawings of brain cell patterns and her interest in t...

Text by Michelle Cantin-Reid The common object reconstructed through skilful assembly and technique; casted, welded, and chased metal forms; almost perfect doppelgangers of the or...

Nicholas Crombach graduated from OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation program in 2012. He has been awarded the Hayden Davies Memorial Award, Samuel Lazar Kagan Award, Abraham and Malka Green Award, and a BMO 1st Art Nomination. His work has been seen at Word On The Street, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, the Al Green...

In the mid-1990s, Wolstenholme began casting anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, such as Zoloft, Paxil, Valium and Dexedrine, in sterling silver. These were made into pend...

Text by Nancy Webb It’s Saturday night and Karine Payette is in her studio. We meander into a conversation about the dog she used to have and her soft spot for German shepherds, an intensely obedient and loyal breed in a deceivingly wolf-like package. Payette’s most recent series of photographs, sculptures and video work seem to speak directly to this preoccupation with the multifaceted nature of human-animal relationships—the dialogues of control, intimacy, violence and domestication that subtly take place on an interspecies level. Her workspace is part laboratory, part prop closet—a bowl of fur sits not far from her computer. Somehow in this bright, open, chemical-clean scented room, Payette conjures wildness. We are taken to a strange place, the borderlands of interspecies mingling. At one extreme of the animal-human dynamics scale is the stalwart compliance of a professionally trained German shepherd who responds to commands with robotic precision. Here, power is comfortably held by an off-screen voice, animality pacified by a set of linguistic prompts. At the other end of the scale is a sculpture of a human figure clad in red, sharing a languorous kiss with a wolf. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is immediately called to mind, except that here our hooded protagonist seems to have bailed on grandmother’s orders, instead opting for a forest floor make-out with her canine stalker. This taboo mise-en-scène is a brazen inquiry into the boundaries we maintain with our animal counterparts. Its scale and three-dimensionality contribute to a feeling of immersion that the artist has been courting with her work for the past several years. It feels as though you’ve just walked in on something: you are implicated and your discomfort is like an invisible mist that coats these inanimate beings. Elsewhere in Payette’s suite of anthropomorphic works, the demarcation between species grows even fainter. A photographic series depicts the slow encroachment of fur, scales and feathers on human skin—a striking process of contamination facilitated by touch. The fusion of flesh, charcoal cat fur and a pale silky dress...

Text by Marsha Taichman [...] There is art unless there is so much missing we cannot build a structure around it.. - Kate Hall, from Water Tower, 1998-2000 (after Rachel Whiteread) Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle presents a new collection of works at Art Mûr that is sure to surprise and delight gallery goers. These works are full of pristine lines and beautiful intrigue. He constructs and presents miniatures and life-size pieces that are subversive and unusual upon close examination. In these pieces, scale can be quite skewed. Even when objects are the size that we expect them to be, say, a 15-foot silver gazebo that one may enter and stand inside, they seem small. Lachapelle’s works can be mounted displays of tiny mechanical-seeming devices, apparatuses of unknown origins with no clear purpose, despite the fact that they offer a distinct air of functionality. In the works that Lachapelle has selected for this exhibition at Art Mûr, his subject matter has moved away from human and animal scenes and delved deeper into free-standing machinations. This means that we will see a greater starkness and a closer focus on the materiality in his constructions. The collection is full of the unexpected and the unusual. A library with a sunken-in, curved interior of wavy shelves...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Karine Giboulo creates colourful miniature worlds in which depictions of reality and flights of fantasy mingle. Her intricate sculpted scenes use pathos and humour to comment on the ...

I have been taking impressions of pills and creating a pill archive where pills are cast in silver and/or gold since 1995. At that time I was given pills as an answer to something th...

How an object relates to its function greatly determines a society’s view and/or perception of that object. Most objects directly mirror their utilitarian role in their qualities and...

Born in 1970 in Chatham, Ontario, Jean-Robert Drouillard lives and works in Québec City. Following studies in literature and creative writing, he took up sculpture. In 2000, he obta...

Born in 1970 in Chatham, Ontario, Jean-Robert Drouillard lives and works in Québec City. Following studies in literature and creative writing, he took up sculpture. In 2000, he obta...

Karine Payette, who holds a MFA from UQAM, lives and works in Montreal. Her works have been displayed in solo exhibitions, notably at the Galerie de l’UQAM (Confort instable, 2012) and at Le lieu, Centre en art actuel in Quebec City (L’autre dimanche matin...

Clint Neufeld is a sculptor who works with concepts of masculine identity, currently in the form of ceramic transformations of engines and transmissions. Neufeld was born and rais...

Beyond Sociology: The Act of Seeing a Person Text by Edwin Janzen It is hardly surprising that in our society perceptions of homeless persons remain two-dimensional, stereotypical, inadequate. Even for the rare administration tackling the problems of homelessness in an effective, meaningful way, the homeless person’s humanity is buried beneath a mountain of endless statistical markers: mental illness, substance abuse, soup-kitchen attendance, etc. The enormous negativity lingering about the resultant profile permits scant room for other, arguably important accoutrements of the human experience—character, emotion, intellect, beauty, relationship to divinity—and leaves homeless persons basically where they already are: on the street, the objects of middle-class loathing or pity. Struck by this depressing determinism, artist Bevan Ramsay set out to cast portrait busts of homeless persons (one woman, the others men), producing an edition in fine, white statuary Hydrocal plaster mounted on mahogany bases. These portraits, titled Lesser Gods...

The four life size figurative sculptures in Monuments of a Perfect Future are derived from low brow culture narratives, detailing stories of extra-terrestrial travel, heroic tales originating from science fiction, and mythology rooted in comic book narratives. Presenting a collision of high art materials (bronze, steel, wood) with pop culture imagery, this body of sculpture examines the division between high art and popular culture. This series of new sculptures originate from research conducted while attending San Diego Comic-Con (2013) as well as deriving inspiration from the master figurative sculptors Augustus Rodin and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Monumentality speaks in the language of absolutes; the exhibition Monuments of a Perfect Future subverts the idea of absolutes through undermining monumental motifs with irony, humor and pathos. Ultimately, these works examine the tragic failure of the characters represented, as well as the failed myth of unending progress promised by modernism and technological advancement. Brandon Vickerd is a Toronto based sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at York University. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1999) and his MFA from the University of Victoria (2001). In the past several years his exhibited projects have been diverse in form and content, including site specific interventions, public performances and object based sculpture. Projects such as Dance of the Cranes (Toronto, 2009) and Dance of the Cranes, Requiem for Architecture (Brooklyn, 2012) are community based projects outside the gallery that seek to transform the cityscape into a stage for performance. These performances consist of choreographed dances executed by high-rise construction cranes perched upon condo developments while viewers watch from the street bellow. Public works such as Satellite and Northern Satellite are similar attempts to engage the public in a discourse about our conflicting ways of understanding landscape. In gallery exhibitions he engages the audience through employing the language of monumental figurative sculpture subverting dominant cultural narratives by creating monuments to popular culture characters (Dead Astronaut...

After visiting the underworld of overconsumption in "Made in China" (All you can eat and Electronic Village, 2008), Giboulo gravitates to a different aspect of economic globalization and urbanization in this work: the uncontrolled growth of slums (principally in the Southern hemisphere and the East), where the statistics are alarming. As life in the country becomes increasingly difficult, the migration of their agrarian people to urban centers regularly transforms the hopes and dreams of rural dwellers into a second nightmare. In truth, it is more accurate to speak of over-urbanization, of “slumization” - to borrow the term from the sociologist Mike Davis...

Cal Lane creates intricate sculptures using religious or mythological imagery and lace-like patterns juxtaposed within industrial materials such as steel beams, oil drums and ammunit...

The Architecture of Knowledge in the work of Guillaume Lachapelle L. Sasha Gora Jorge Luis Borges imagined the universe as a library, one “composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” The bookshelves in Guillaume Lachapelle’s rigorously detailed, architectural miniatures are similar imaginings of knowledge, infinity, and the meaning of books. When Lachapelle predominantly sculpted with wood, the library was already present in his work. Take for instance the delicate shelves in Maneges (2004-2006). In 2009, he began to employ 3D printing and since, he has drafted bookshelves as white, intricately printed sculptures. Fissure, 2009, a bookshelf whose centre collapses, like quicksand, into a void; Le piège, 2009, an isolated balcony that protrudes from a bookshelf; Évasion 2, 2011, a fragile staircase that leads to a corridor library. Despite their sculptural form, these pieces never feel static. They suggest something beyond the shelves. Books are often described as gateways to other worlds and the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster exemplifies this literally. In her 2013 La Bibliothèque clandestine at Palais de Tokyo what at first appears to be a bookshelf is actually a rotating door that opens into a secret gallery. For Lachapelle’s sixth solo exhibition at Art Mûr, Vision, we encounter again the library. This time, he employs single-sided mirrors to exaggerate a sense of the infinite, getting closer to Borges’ indefinite library, such as in Awaiting Knowledge (2013). We confront the same architecture in Metro (2013) and Last Night (2013). A library, a subway car and a hallway from the Titanic, respectively, all melt into an intriguing yet alarmingly dark void. Where does the darkness at the end of hall lead to? Lachapelle’s miniatures act as a threshold between what is seen and not seen. Although a good five centuries apart, the printing press and 3D printing both belong to the history of print. However, in Lachapelle’s miniatures, books are separated from their use. We cannot read them. They are rendered decorative, almost fetishized, and so instead we must mediate on their symbolism. This requires imagination. Lachapelle’s models are far too tiny for us to occupy physically, and so we must occupy them with our imagination, as when we occupy books, turning the words into the stories and images of people and places. In Borges’ story, what began as extravagant happiness - the Library of Babel housing all books and holding all of the world’s answers – turned to depression: “The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable.” For Lachapelle, books represent a similar anxiety: as much as we know, there is always more that we don’t. Guillaume Lachapelle's artistic practice is shaped predominantly by sculpture, expressed in the form of installations and detailed miniature models. Lachapelle presents playful universes which combine objects of undetermined purpose; in this way, he opens the conventions of our reality to fresh disposition. The architecture of his models - which Lachapelle has recently begun to make with the help of the latest 3-D printing technology - shows motifs originating from the everyday, certainly, but seeming strange, alienating or even uncanny when combined as the artist chooses. A kind of transition between two worlds often appears in Lachapelle's work - for example when the model of a library filled with books curves inwards and reveals a mysterious opening pointing into darkness - these are the artist's references to spaces and occurrences which may be concealed below the surface of outward semblance. Guillaume Lachapelle has participated in several solo and group exhibitions including Manèges at Circa - Centre d'Exposition Art Contemporain (Montreal) in 2006; Quebec Gold at the Ancien Collège des Jésuites (Rheims, France) in 2008 and in Abracadabra (Edward Day...

Guillaume Lachapelle's artistic practice is shaped predominantly by sculpture, expressed in the form of installations and detailed miniature models. Lachapelle presents playful unive...

Guillaume Lachapelle's artistic practice is shaped predominantly by sculpture, expressed in the form of installations and detailed miniature models. Lachapelle presents playful unive...

Guillaume Lachapelle's artistic practice is shaped predominantly by sculpture, expressed in the form of installations and detailed miniature models. Lachapelle presents playful unive...

Purposely diverse, my work straddles the line between high and low culture, acting as a catalyst for critical thought and addressing the failed promise of a modernist future predicat...

Text by Michelle Cantin-Reid The common object reconstructed through skilful assembly and technique; casted, welded, and chased metal forms; almost perfect doppelgangers of the originals, this is how Zeke Moores’ work appears. Upon closer consideration, the materiality of these pieces comes to light. Deceivingly close to the real thing, they greatly diverge from the original. From chromed steel Trashcans to the reconstructed Port-O-Potty made from cast aluminum and nickel-plated steel, Moores uses metalsmithing techniques to render his sculptures, usurping of the traditional modes of mass production as well as the disposable materiality that we associate with these objects. In his work, mechanised assembly line production and objects made to be thrown out or forgotten become a craftsman’s labour of love. As the disposable dejected everyday object is taken from the street and placed into the gallery, our use and imposition of a hierarchy on objects becomes apparent. However, it also speaks of the amount of work no longer done by people or often done by a series of anonymous workers in a repetitive but carefully choreographed dance with machines. We approach very differently a practical or a mass-produced object and one that is crafted. These works also celebrate those objects designed for practical but not specifically aesthetic purposes. The imposition of a new materiality gives them durability and in the case of bronze casts or chrome plating a superficial prestige. Sitting in a gallery contemplated and beheld, the cast bronze Barrier is not unlike a monument or a statue. Though, these nobler materials are not wherein the beauty lies. Happy Meal...