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Playpoem Verse Three (The Wave)

Playpoem Verse Three (The Wave) is a choregraphed music performance for the camera. Eleven music students from the Université de Moncton create a representation of a wave on a keyboard. Playpoem Verse Three (The Wave) est une performance musicale chorégraphiée pour la caméra. Onze étudiants en musique de l’Université de Moncton créent la représentation d’une vague sur un clavier.

…and Room in the Bag of Stars, PHI Fondation 2021-22

Hanging from a Thread is a sculpture and a performance exploring the fragile and temporal nature of life, paper and words. The sculpture is formed from paper threads spun from the Grolier Encyclopedia Canadiana 1958. The threads have been knotted and solidified with a sugar-water solution to create a live-size human figure. The performance is a questioning of my idea of the father and the sacredness of the sculptural object. It is an opportunity for me to explore my story of grieving a loss of trust. It is also a story about my own mortality. It is about imagining a […]

Maison de rêves, Maison de la culture Plateau Mont-Royal, 2021

Communiqué de presse pour l’exposition : Maison de rêves Pour Karen, le papier est un matériau fondamental, pour Réjane, ce sont les mots. En utilisant les pages manuscrites des cahiers de rêves de Réjane que celle-ci écrit depuis plus de trente ans, soit plus de 8 000 feuilles, Karen a construit une maison de rêves en papier. Le travail patient et répétitif qu’a exigé la fabrication de cette sculpture/installation fait ici écho à la discipline quotidienne d’écriture de Réjane tout en la matérialisant. Ces deux artistes vous invitent à explorer Une maison de rêves, un univers fait de mots, de papiers et […]

La Biennale Barachois in situ, 3e édition / Village/Paysage, été 2021

La Berge bouge / The Shifting Seashore Deux fois par jour, la marée marque le rivage de l’océan d’une trainée d’algues, d’objets flottants, de déchets et d’ordures. Dans un monde où les océans montent, les côtes se déplacent vers l’intérieur des terres, où sera le littoral de Barachois dans cinquante ans ? La Berge bouge est une réflexion sur le mouvement de l’eau et la transformation de l’environnement naturel provoqué par les changements climatiques. Chaque jour de la Biennale, Karen Trask parcourra le rivage pour recueillir les déchets de la mer et les tresser avec les herbes et les fleurs […]

A Floating House of Dreams/ Une Maison de rêve(s) flottante

The house is made of approximately 15,000 pages of handwritten stream-of-conscious by Montreal author, Réjane Bougé – the result of a thirty-year-old, daily, writing practice inspired by her previous night’s dreams.  Réjane was looking to give her collection to an artist working with paper. An initial attempt with Louise Viger ended abruptly with Louise’s death due to cancer. Manon Tourigny of Centre Clark brought us together. Réjane and I began meeting monthly in the summer of 2019. The idea to make the house came to me as a result of our meetings. When Réjane initially proposed giving me her writing, […]

Belkis Ayón, Arte Continua and Las Bellas Artes, Havana

In the fall of 2019, I was part of a group of artists and cultural workers that travelled to Havana for the second half and final exhibition of the Montreal-Habana exchange. Each day was full of planned events and many exchanges with Cuban and Montreal artists. Here, I will focus on a visit to the art department of the university, an exhibition at Arte Continua and a presentation of the work of Cuban artist, Belkis Ayon by Cristina Vives in the Estudio Figueroa – Vives. A small group of us accepted an invitation by one of the professors to visit […]

Mouvance, the Opera

A chance encounter late summer 2018 in Sackville, New Brunswick led me to participate in something I never imagined doing. Inspired by my work, Suzie LeBlanc, soprano and director of Le Nouvel opera asked me to design and make the set and costume for a new opera she was preparing with composer Jérôme Blais. I hesitated, not sure how I could integrate this into my already full-time work as the artist-in-residence at Mount Allison University. Erik Edson, the director of the art department convinced me that this would be a great opportunity for my student interns, Bre Darlison and Madeleine […]

Noeuds d’écoute / Listening Knots, 2019, Galerie Oboro

Noeuds d’écoute Listening Knots includes five text-based installations, a video projection and a continuous performance inspired by Virginia Woolf’s, The Waves. Originally published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. I imagined myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, the human body, the tide, the ocean and the land; this thought guided the making of the work during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton and Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Students, friends, the ocean and the land were active participants. Nœuds d’écoute Listening Knots comprend cinq installations […]

The End of an Amazing Residency

The final days of my artist residency in New Brunswick played out in Sackville at Mount Allison University in December 2018. I still feel the glow of the beauty of those very rich and ever-so-full days. With the help of many interns, the fishing net knotted with dictionary paper-thread grew to 30 x 12 feet. I used four dictionaries relevant to south-eastern New Brunswick: Le Glossaire acadian, Le Petit Larousse Illustré, Silus Tertias Rand’s English to Mi’kmaq and Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate. My goal was to put the net into the rising tide of the Bay of Fundy and let […]