Description

The Motherwall video projection shows a single continuous shot of a wall in an apartment covered with papers with hand-written text. The wall is unevenly lit with natural light. The papers on the wall are a series of letters written to the artist’s mother. They are pinned at the top, and when the wind comes into the room it raises and lowers the pages. There is no sound.

The original low-resolution version of this video was up-scaled to HD in 2014 for the exhibition L’ombre et la forme.


Statement

The image from Motherwall appears in the artist book INTERSECTIONS conjunctions, with the following text: “Manifesting physically as a wall in my home studio, this space slowly became the site of a struggle with words. Messages that I began to write to my mother were pinned to that wall. My mother died when I was very young. I have few memories of her. I came to recognize this empty space as a ‘Motherspace’ that I had to re-invent in order to become a mother’s daughter.” The subject of the work is not explicit, but rather it creates an ambience imbued with a mysterious ghostly presence.



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
L’une fait lire l’autre (Langage plus)
solo
November 23 – December 21, 2001
Langage plus, Alma, Québec, Canada
Breathing Room
solo
May 20 – June 12, 1999
Latitude 53 Society of Artists, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
February 13 – March 9, 1997
Galerie Clark, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Publications

Breathing Room: an installation by Karen Trask
Beau Coleman (1998). Latitude 53, 4 pages