Espace Maurice
Friday, January 17th – Saturday, January 25th
“Flowers waiting Phantoms, Phantasmal surface of earth under blue old space”
Jeremy Richer-Légaré, Fiona Ruth, Phil Tremble
Curated by Marie Ségolène C Brault
9
Flowers waiting,
Phantoms,
Phantasmal surface
Of earth under
blue old space (1)
This time of year, I sleep an inordinate amount. This is not a unique phenomenon. Most aren’t impervious to seasons, and God knows this might last until spring. I sleep with a book entitled Torpor at the end of my bed. A Kraus’ book that is not at all about mammalian hibernation or metabolic preservation (although perhaps metaphorically that may apply, I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet). I see the word every morning, greeting me far later than my alarm. Time contracts. Sunlight is scarce. But from my bed, night time doesn’t darken all the way. Moonlight spreads itself onto the snow – it’s just a whole lot of blue. Nothing escapes it.
Ploughmen wait just like me. Earth’s frozen from here to the Midwest and the Prairies. All I can think about is leaving. You know the way birds conserve energy in flight? Their body temperature goes down, 12 degrees below average. All I can do is stay put. When I wake up at 3 for water, it isn’t clear what’s the phantom – how deep’s the snow. Some birds do stick around, you know. I wonder what great truth could be extracted from their song. Like Pelican’s blood, by which melody could I be revived.
(1) Jack Kerouac, “Beginning With A Few Haikus Some of Them Addresses in The Book”, Poems All Sizes, 1992.
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FIONA RUTH (b.1998, Montreal, QC) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal. Her paintings are meditations on lived experiences, dreams and imagined scenes. The work blurs the line between figuration and abstraction focusing on emulating tranquility and expansiveness. The back and forth of layering and paint removal results in a call and response technique that guides the work to resolution. Fiona Ruth received her BFA in Art History and Studio Arts from Concordia University (2022).
JEREMY RICHER-LÉGARÉ (b.1995) is an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Quebec. Primarily through painting and drawing, his practice tends towards process based methods with a particular interest for temporally elusive imagery and narrative. Jeremy is currently completing his BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
PHIL TREMBLE lives and works in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University (2020), and is currently completing a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal. His practice, initially sculptural and installation-based, is now mainly concerned with drawing. His work has been featured in the exhibitions such as: Art.Art (Galerie Transmission, Montréal, 2019), Un point de chute (L’Oeil de Poisson, Québec, 2021), Lysis (Espace Maurice-hors site, Montréal, 2024).