Description

For Tapis magique the artist formed lengths of colourful, pigmented paper pulp, which she coiled into the spiral shape of a rug. Strips of photo-lithographs are integrated into hand-formed coils assembled to form the image of two feet and their wet footprints on a stone. The image is repeated three times around the circumference. Also integrated into the coils are discreet black and white photo-transfers of the artist’s grandmother and aunts.


Statement

I enjoy a seemingly impossible task and Tapis magique was an interesting challenge: how to integrate a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional paper sculpture? Each image of feet needed two lithographs in order to compensate for the loss of image in rolling it under in the strips for the carpet and calculating the curve of each strip was an added complication. I loved how the feet seem to hover and dance. The carpet references the passing on of matriarchal knowledge, the skills of making things. While the title “magic carpet” and the bare feet add another dimension, moving from the realm of domesticity to the realm of fantasy, travel, leisure, fun…

Karen Trask & Don Goodes, 2024



Exhibition History

September 14 – November 16, 2014
La salle Alfred-Pellan, Laval, Québec, Canada
Description

Shadow and Form brings together works by Karen Trask from 1989 to 2014.

L’ombre et la forme propose au visiteur un espace de découverte d’expériences sensibles. On y retrouve des notions importantes dans l’œuvre de l’artiste montréalaise Karen Trask : l’acte de faire et de défaire, l’impossibilité de fixer le temps, l’emprise des images et la portée des mots dans l’imaginaire et la mémoire.

Statement

Karen Trask’s exhibition L’ombre et la forme underlines her fascination for the fluid and transformable nature of the primary materials: water, air and light. In her work, Karen Trask evokes the impossibility of stopping time, affirms the importance of words and the process of making and touch. Repeated gestures of a patient and continuous labour to produce an image, an object or a form inscribes the work of Karen Trask in a practice associated to process, to duration and a subtle manifestation of erosion. The sculptures, the photographic images, the videos, the objects and the words of this exhibition translate what the artist qualifies as little nothings: these unusual experiences where simplicity finds a form. Sensitive to the process of creation and the notion of time in a work, Nicole Gingras is the curator of this exhibition, accompanying the artist in her reflection.

Source: Wall text for the exhibition, La Maison des arts de Laval, 2014

Curator(s)
Nicole Gingras

Publications

L’odeur de l’encre Trois regards sur l’estampe actuelle
Rémy Charest (1994). Le Devoir, vendredi 20 mai 1994.

An article about the work, Tapis magique, in the exhibition, L’odeur de l’encre, held in la Maison Hamel-Bruneau, Ste-Foy, Québec.