Lieux Suspendus

Galerie Deux Poissons is delighted to begin our 2019 program with “Lieux suspendus”, a duo exhibition featuring the work of Montreal artists Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron and Chloë Charce. Both are highly talented graduates of Concordia University’s MFA program in sculpture—and equally both challenge, and depart from every traditional notion of sculpture within their respective practices, embracing and exploring a wide terrain of three and two-dimensional possibilities.

In “Lieux suspendus”, different approaches to installing a space, and how to illuminate it, are used to animate the idea of suspension, in both time and space, and to carve out positive and negative dimensions in the all-over space of the gallery. Skillfully intertwined works explore and equate concepts of inside to outside, imagery to object, and positive to negative space, subtly arguing for a suspension in our visual and mental regard, as they coax fleeting and fugitive effects into being, and focus our attention onto them. From different technical and personal approaches, Abbondanza-Bergeron and Charce nonetheless share a tendency to explore concepts of materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, illumination and darkness through the shaping, manipulation and placement of objects and materials in space.

This issue of a deeply complex “suspension”—in which everything responds to and seems to defy gravity, movement and time—is a projection of the inner mental, and spiritual space found in both artists’ work, as much as in the space of the gallery. Both Abbondanza-Bergeron and Charce equate this multitudinous interior space with the exterior space of the exhibition. As such, the gallery environment can be said to embody and become the artwork—and its experience—as much as the site of it.