Colette Laliberté: Folds in Space

Friday, September 20, 2019 - 10:00am to Thursday, December 26, 2019 - 6:00pm

Folds in Space 

September 20 to December 26, 2019 
Monday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm 

Titled “Folds in Space”, Laliberté’s new work builds art and architecture historical references into a multi-planar meditation on our immediate contemporary built environment. Echoing Malevich’s Suprematist non-objectivist art probes, Le Corbusier’s modernist anti-decorative high-rise community architecture, and Soviet architectural Brutalism, “Folds in Space” invites us to re-envision community existence in a seemingly inevitable megastructural Borg.  

We would like to thank the artist for her generosity in loaning us her work. We would also like to thank volunteers Assistant Curator Patricia Pastén and Installation Assistant Anastasia Tarkhanova. This is the eighth in a series of exhibitions of contemporary artworks at 12 Degrees. 

David McIntosh, Curator 

2 Degrees exhibition space is located in a low-rise condominium in Toronto’s Grange community, increasingly surrounded by a forest of new high-rise condominiums. The setting prompted Colette Laliberté to reflect on rapid urban development and the lack of cohesive planning of many major cities in North America. What are the experiences that have been drawn from Le Corbusier’s urban design of the early twentieth century modernist architecture that favoured social environment? Has the notion of the village and neighborhood life become obsolete? Shall we conclude that urban developers are indifferent to the notion of community?  

As a response, she has developed a site specific installation from a set of vertical modules made of folded, unfolded, refolded paper shapes. She combines perspectival effects with an illusionistic play of depth, three-dimensionality with flat planes, to question our understanding of space and place. Each construction spans the full width of the twenty-two-foot exhibition wall at different levels. These geometrically-shaped assemblages, painted in a range of shades of greys and solid black, suggest cement and steel used in the construction of highrises. The work is a reminder of the brooding aesthetics of Brutalist architecture. 

Colette Laliberté has had a number of exhibitions, including Doris McCarthy Gallery (Scarborough, ON); Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton, ON); Art Gallery of Peterborough (Peterborough, ON); Gallery Skol (Montreal, Qc); Art Gallery of the Cultural Centre of the University of Sherbrooke (Sherbrooke, Qc); Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton, N-B); Galera de Arte Universal (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba). She has also participated in various residencies worldwide such as: Marnay Art Centre (Marnay sur-Mer, France); Medialab-Prado, (Madrid, Spain); Triangle’s Residency, (Brooklyn, New York); The Banff Centre (Banff, AB) and most recently at the Gallery du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury, ON); The Latchman  

Gallery (Stouffville, ON); 2 Rooms Contemporary Art Residencies, (Duntara, NL). Colette Laliberté has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Ontario, Quebec, local, provincial and federal governmental agencies. She has spoken about her work in public lectures at University of Windsor, Guelph University, Waterloo University, York University, Queen’s University, University of Quebec in Montreal, among others, and currently she holds a tenured position at OCAD University. 

Colette Laliberté acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. 

 

 

 

Venue & Address: 
12 Degrees 15 Beverley Street, Toronto, ON
black, grey, white and blue geometric shapes, works on paper