The Motion and the Act

McBride Contemporain is delighted to present The Motion and the Act, a group show bringing together artists Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Michelle Furlong, and Ara Osterweil. The exhibition centres around the tensions generated by anticipatory, in-between states. Through their respective mediums, each artist confronts this constrained, unsustainable threshold, where possibility and potential themselves can create a place of horror or beauty.

The Motion and the Act features a webcam video work by Grebmeier Forget, intimate in its content and size, yet still reverberating through the empty blank space that frames it. Her twirling body serves as the vehicle through which anticipation is felt, each rotation creating private pink abstractions only viewable by one viewer at a time. This show also introduces new drawings by the artist, framed distortions on the glossy surface of magazine pages, utilizing the immediacy of makeup to disfigure what exists to be experienced inside the boundary.

Furlong’s work forges gestural traces into tangible 3D structures, where being and becoming are able to dance together for at least an instant and take their place within the delimited liminal space between our desires, our aims, and our actions. Furlong contends with the fragility of older ceramic hand works, sculpting them into new compositions whose physicality engenders tension through suspended stasis.

Osterweil is a painter of large-scale color field abstractions. With an aim to reconstruct the sense of effacement experienced by shifting desires and modes of being, Osterweil works between stain technique and collage, building and layering a visible archive of fragments through both intentional and random operations, evoking the curiosity and desire that draws us toward the precipice of resolution and outcome, and the electric apprehension that keeps us abandoned before the unknown.