Description

Catching Time / Attraper le temps is made up of a video projected onto the grey cardboard facing of a metal sandwich board. The 15 minute long video shows only the shadow of Karen’s hand as it tries to catch 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper, which fall approximately every five seconds into the frame from above. The task of catching the paper is difficult, and the hand fails to grab many of the falling pages. The light causing the shadow in the video is the light of the setting sun coming in a window. We see the shadows move slowly in the sandwich board frame due to the movement of the sun. The sandwich board acts as a screen, and stands in the space of the darkened gallery.


Statement

Catching Time / Attraper le temps was a response to Richard Serra’s film Hand Catching Lead (1968) in which the American sculptor’s soot covered hand, full frame, attempts to catch scraps of lead falling from above. “I just thought oh yeah, big steel sculptor. I’m the paper sculptor. I’m going to try and catch paper. And it’s just as hard, maybe even harder.” (Karen Trask, 2024, AOPA) What began as an ironic nod in opposition to the heroics of macho minimalism, became an expression of the artist’s own interests.

The work is a play between solidity and instability. Using shadow and light instead of the actual hand made sense to Karen because of its ephemerality. Yet there is still a strong sense of the force of gravity, as we stand before the illusion of the paper falling from top to bottom, down the frame of the sandwich board.

The sandwich board is known primarily as a way of bringing print advertising into the pedestrian space. Catching Time / Attraper le temps capitalizes on this reference by going against convention and offering up an enigmatic rather than a printed selling message on the support, while benefiting from it’s form which allows the video to come off the wall, making it an object occupying the viewer’s space.

For the viewer the simple narrative of the hand’s attempts to snatch the falling pages is captivating. Karen calls the act of trying to catch the pages “an impossible task.” “Time just keeps flowing, you imagine, ‘Ok, now [the hand will catch the paper], no now, now, now? When is now? Now is now?’ Now just never stays still. It’s always moving. That piece of paper just keeps falling and you keep trying to catch it. But you can’t.” The element of time and celestial bodies is brought into the work by the use of the setting sun as a light source, the action of the pages, and the depiction of gravity.

Don Goodes & Karen Trask, 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
solo
October 20 – November 17, 2012
CIRCA Art Actuel, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Description

Riens is an exhibition including several kinetic sculptures, a video projection, video installations and paper tableaux with integrated programmed lighting. The exhibition was presented late in the autumn of 2012 without any artificial lighting other than what was programmed and part of the sculptural elements, so as the days shortened the afternoon light disappeared by 4pm and the gallery was dark.

Statement

It was in Paris, in 2008, that Karen Trask sought out the work of Mallarmé – part of her residency research and an in-depth study of the concept of ‘nothing’, in all its elusiveness and even contradiction, starting with its enunciation: to think of ‘nothing’ is already to give it substance, to reverse the announced absence. By pluralising ‘nothing’, the title of the exhibition consolidates this semantic rupture, at the same time releasing its philosophical potential.

Paper is the raw material here. A neutral, flat textile symbolising emptiness, it lends itself to a variety of media. Sometimes a sculpture, sometimes a multimedia platform, sometimes the subject of videos, other times the object of animated films, blank, pale paper finds its conceptual extension in the notion of ‘nothing’. The elusive space inherent in this notion is also reflected in the play of shadows that add a poetic and rhetorical dimension to the artist’s tools. The dark reflections of the words carved into the paper evoke multiple possible readings, sometimes humorous in tone, but always carefully considered, the same care that can be seen in the delicate, measured treatment of the fragile materials used or made. This is particularly true of the large paper canvas that Trask has created piece by piece from more resistant linen fibres, then turned into a hybrid material, infiltrated with optical fibres that at times reveal constellations visible to the most contemplative eyes.

“I see the sky as a veil, like a large sheet of paper”. The artist’s words echo the almost romantic impression one gets when standing, in the already vast space of the gallery, in front of this immense sheet of paper that seems to have fossilised a particular moment in the universe. The sublime is never far from the idea of nothingness. What’s more, all these “nothings” move, they are in motion. They are “nothings” inscribed in a temporality, thus going against the idea of absence as stagnation. Yet this temporality is not linear; rather, it is reminiscent of a pulse that is both cyclical and furtive. The eternal recommencement of nothing.

At the heart of this long-term research, writing is a vital tool. Words can be found in almost all of Karen Trask’s projects, but the artist’s book that accompanies this exhibition demonstrates their literary scope. In it, ‘nothing’ meets love and death, the two great pendulums of the sensitive, the strongest engines of vertigo. Breaks in the artist’s own experience, some of the most striking, sit side by side with documented references and quotations essential to the issues that have occupied her for so many years. Through the artist’s reflections, ‘nothingness’, understood as the absence of being, is revealed in a complementary and accurate way in relation to the shadows and objects that surround it.

Aseman Sabet (translated from French), 2012

C’est à Paris, en 2008, que Karen Trask rencontre Mallarmé, pour qui elle s’est expressément déplacée. De cette rencontre naît un travail approfondi sur le concept du « rien », dans ce qu’il comprend d’insaisissable, voire de contradictoire, à commencer par son énonciation : penser le « rien », c’est déjà lui donner un corps, c’est renverser l’absence annoncée. En pluralisant le « rien », le titre de l’exposition consolide cette rupture sémantique, relâchant du même coup son potentiel philosophique.

Le papier est ici matière première. Trame neutre et plane, symbolisant le vide, il se prête au jeu de différents médiums. Tantôt sculpture, tantôt plateforme multimédia, parfois sujet de vidéos, d’autres fois objet de films d’animation, le papier vierge et pâle trouve dans la notion du « rien » son extension conceptuelle. L’espace fuyant propre à cette notion se reflète également dans les jeux d’ombres qui rajoutent à la grammaire de l’artiste une dimension à la fois poétique et rhétorique. Les reflets sombres des mots taillés dans le papier évoquent des possibilités de lectures multiples, aux consonances parfois humoristiques, mais toujours réfléchies avec attention, cette même attention que l’on retrace dans le traitement délicat et mesuré des matières fragiles qui sont employés ou fabriqués. C’est notamment le cas de la grande toile de papier que Trask a créée morceau par morceau à partir de fibres de lin, plus résistantes, pour ensuite en faire une matière hybride, infiltrée de fibres optiques qui laissent apparaître, par moments, des constellations visibles aux yeux des plus contemplatifs.

« Je vois le ciel comme un voile, comme un grand papier ». Les mots de l’artiste font écho à cette impression, presque romantique, qui se dégage lorsqu’on se tient, dans l’espace déjà vaste de la galerie, devant cette immense feuille de papier qui semble avoir fossilisé un moment particulier de l’univers. Le sublime n’est jamais loin de l’idée du néant. D’ailleurs, tout ces « riens » bougent, ils sont en mouvement. Ce sont des « riens » inscrits dans une temporalité, allant ainsi à l’encontre de l’absence pensée comme statisme. Cette temporalité n’est pourtant pas linéaire ; elle rappelle plutôt une pulsation à la fois cyclique et furtive. L’éternel recommencement du rien.

Au centre de cette recherche de longue haleine, l’écriture s’impose comme un outil vital. Si on trouve les mots dans presque tous les projets de Karen Trask, le livre d’artiste qui accompagne cette exposition en démontre l’envergure littéraire. Le « rien » y rejoint l’amour et la mort, les deux grands balanciers du sensible, les plus forts moteurs du vertige. Les brèches ouvertes sur le vécu de l’artiste, parfois sur certaines expériences des plus marquantes, côtoient des références documentées, des citations essentielles à la problématique qui l’occupe depuis tant d’années. À travers les réflexions de l’artiste, le « rien » entendu comme absence de l’être se révèle dans une déclinaison complémentaire et juste face aux ombres et aux objets qui l’entourent.

Aseman Sabet, 2012