Valérie Blass

Curated by Lesley Johnstone

Valérie Blass (born in Montréal in 1967) is a sculptor in every sense of the word. Her practice is fundamentally a question of creating encounters – between her own body and the objects she creates, between one sculpture and another, between the physicality of the viewer and that of the works in a given space. Employing virtually every sculptural technique, from moulding, casting, carving and modelling, to assemblage and bricolage, she explores the territories between animal, human and inanimate forms, creating strange, hybrid objects.

The impact of Blass’s work resides in the anachronistic way she navigates between two scultural traditions. She makes free-standing, vertical, handmade, human-scale, autonomous pieces that located her squarely within the tradition of figurative sculpture. But the diversity of her materials and the plethora of mass-produced, bought and found objects she uses, stemming from an enthusiastic engagement with the material culture of the twenty-first century, anchor her art in assemblage and bricolage.

Valérie Blass’s work is a kind of material problem solving as she experiments with ways of making visible to images she forms in her mind. Paying attention to the facture – to how the artwork is made and what it is made of – is paramount to grasping its significance. She takes everyday consumer objects out of circulation and, through a variety of material strategies, creates a new thing that acknowledges the mass-produced, pop-cultural origins of its fragments yet also declares its identity as an artwork. Each object brings with it a range of assoiations and meanings, as well as a materiality that participates in the communicative resonance of the final work. Navigating the terrain between figuration and abstraction, the recognizable and the indeterminate, the declared and the evoked, the artist creates a duality that is charged with potential. Her works generate confusion between the found and the made, the deskilled, the mass-produced and the reskilled, jarring familiar perceptions and cognitive channels so as to produce a moment of dissonance and insight.

Lesley Johnstone, MACM Curator

Presented by the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, The exhibition Valérie Blass is organized and circulated by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.