Luanne Martineau at the Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University

Luanne Martineau
Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke (Québec)
Curators: Vicky Chainey Gagnon and Karine Di Genova
January 14 – March 14, 2015

The Foreman Art Gallery is pleased to present this exhibition, featuring the work of artist Luanne Martineau as part of the New Voices series, which presents her most recent work. Combining various methods of craft with the legacies of 1950s and 1960s contemporary art, Martineau explores the spaces in between art genres, unsettling the boundaries between style and ideology in her enticing and sensual works. The experience of the senses in the artist’s works positions them as objects with overt affect. They invite us to go beyond the initial sensation of the materials (felt, wool, fabric, wood) to grasp their meaningful interconnectedness.

For this exhibition, Martineau has created a new, large-scale textile wall work titled Razzle Dazzle. It brings together a multitude of traditional fibre arts techniques, such as print on textile, cut felt, embroidery and appliqué, in a patchwork of assembly based upon Martineau’s artistic history of “cannibalizing” images and forms from her previous work.

The conversations generated through Martineau’s work bridge genres and movements, such as abstract expressionism, post-minimalism, feminism, popular culture and craft, making them fluid, porous and relevant to current discourse. In breaking down the barriers between figurative/abstract and art/craft, Martineau’s work unpacks the formal and critical underpinnings of art history and traditional female work while also engaging with this history to make up for its omissions.

For more information regarding this exhibition, please click here.

Image Credit:
Razzle Dazzle, 2014
Photo: Michel Dubreuil