Groundworks /
Travaux de terrassement /
Lupang Trabaho
TWO-PERSON EXHIBITION WITH MATT SHANE
6400 Monkland Ave
MONTRÉAL, QC
Vernissage: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23RD, 2023 5 PM.
Exhibition Run: NOVEMBER 24, 2023 TO JANUARY 7, 2024
PHOTOS BY Guy L’Heureux.
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Can you feel the ground shift? Moving, fluctuating in time with erosion and harvest; translating footsteps, root growth, the onomatopoeia of everyday life and global consumption.
Carved delicately from negative space, flowers and clouds of ink unfold a mercurial landscape across the gallery’s walls. Trees extend across and past our line of sight with no beginning nor end, no different from the sprawling weblike threads that echo clotheslines or the defined edges of windows, buildings, and machinery. On the foreground of this dreamscape are structures formed by and embedded with every-day,salvaged objects. Composed of natural and synthetic materials, they interrogate the relationships between local and transnational forces within a micro-system whose groundwork is in flux.
In this space, the landscapes of yesteryear and today blur together. Built and shaped by sculptor Kuh Del Rosario and painter/drawer Matt Shane, this metamorphic terrain provides the visual foundation for Groundworks. The exhibition bridges both artists’ different approaches to artmaking, creating a transformative environment that collapses time and space.
Situating their respective works within the reaches of the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) neighbourhood, Del Rosario and Shane task us to reimagine local, living histories and the environment as not “simply given or independent but…entangled with and produced through the very apparatuses we use to make sense of it.”1 They enter the space as long-term visitors and settlers, seeking to fill in the gaps from their personal family and community histories. To this end, they address the ecological impact of urban planning and gentrification within a greater network of human settlement and displacement. Having lived as an uninvited guest on Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal, for the past two years, I also approach this exhibition with grace and as an opportunity to better understand the history of this community and its rapid evolution.
The artists’ synthesis of familiar and dreamlike elements results in an other-worldly space that is conducive to personal reflection on the land, the relationships and the narratives that have and continue to shape it.
Unfolding across the room in washes and precise strokes of ink, Matt Shane translates the histories of Benny Farm, upon which the gallery stands today, into a fluid landscape. Pulling from archival imagery and site-specific elements, All the you I’ll never know evokes a version of the local environment free of the constraints of time and chronology. Strands link each landmark, physical feature, and image, both historical and contemporary, to create a “memorial architecture”2. This architecture represents Shane’s pursuit of knowledge to fill in the gaps in his family’s history in relation to Montreal and what brought him here. Foliage, farmland, and homes sprawl across the painting and it is unclear which came first. As if entering a dream, versions of Benny Farm and NDG abound – from the past, through the present, and into the future.
Each of Kuh Del Rosario’s sculptures represents a minute ecosystem, multifaceted and rich in detail. Salvaged wood and plant matter, dried leaves and fruit peels, recycled paper pulp, chicle, and recycled plastics are but some of the materials gathered in telluric formations. Despite taking on various physical forms, Del Rosario’s structures share a kinship with each by virtue of their compositions. Each assemblage not only speaks to the relationships between the natural and the artificial, but also to points of origin and distribution. Synthetic elements such as plastic, latex, and styrofoam do not appear arbitrarily. Thus, in Del Rosario’s work these substances speak to the trajectories of global production and consumption – from the harvest of natural resources towards industrial production to transnational modes of distribution. These references come to light with the integration of local, natural material. Salvaged from the plant
matter of a melon historically grown on Benny Farm, the work also embodies the crucial junction of local elements and others further afield. Against Shane’s backdrop of fluctuating landmarks and pictures of the local environment, Del Rosario cultivates a topography that concretizes the patterns of travel and movement that inevitably disrupt the land and life endemic to whichever point of arrival.
As the world shifts and transforms in real time, Del Rosario and Shane literally prepare the groundwork to interrogate these changes from within a local context. Groundworks provides the breathing room to reflect on what else is missing and envision what could become. Within these mercurial walls lies the interstices of migration, urban development, and community, in whichever ways we choose to define them now and beyond.
1 Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 9-10.
2 Matt Shane, email message to author, November 7, 2023.
By Laia Karmela Nalian (2023)
As a guest on Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Laia Karmela Nalian (they/she) is completing their MA in Art History at Concordia University. Their research covers the Philippines from the 1970s to the present and the ways in which Filipinx artists reevaluate and challenge the colonial and imperial legacies entrenched within Philippine identity on the mainland and beyond its borders. Outside of their art historical pursuits, Laia tinkers with electronic music under the nom de scène larvisty and has been collecting postage stamps since 2014.