Lyse Lemieux: Painted Drawings

×

Expand

Lyse Lemieux, “Painted Drawings,” 2019

installation view at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver (photo by Mike Love, courtesy of the artist and WAAP)

The Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky once said, “one does not choose content, one submits to it.”

With Painted Drawings, Lyse Lemieux’s material handling of line and form examines not only the tensile possibilities of her materials but also the meaning of her own visual language. With each piece, she investigates the origin of her ideas and how they can lead her where they are meant to go. The corporeality and gentle transgressions of her literary families of Naiads, Kraken, and Nymphs seem to answer part of this question. Fabric, that ever-present protagonist in much of Lemieux’s narratives adds texture and form while colour and humour wink at indeterminate personal tales.

Tales will always be told and drawings will always need painting. Painted Drawings is about a time of submission and a time of release.

In parallel to the exhibition, the artist has invited important Vancouver-based, Kenyan-born poet, Juliane Okot Bitek to respond to the body of work. She has composed the following poem, as well as another, to accompany the exhibition, in keeping with its tone.

Plot Against Plot

left leg felt black

felt like orange

felt like felt

felt like orange felt

felt like orange black

black foot felt left

stripe felt left

felt stripe felt orange

left foot left felt foot at home

orange felt left black at home

felt felt

felt foot felt black

left orange foot felt black

felt foot felt orange at home

orange left

foot left

felt left

foot felt black

orange leg felt black foot at home

LYSE LEMIEUX is the 2017 recipient of the VIVA Award granted annually by the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation for outstanding achievement in the Visual Arts. Lemieux’s most recent solo exhibitions include in 2018 the Contemporary Art Gallery’s large scale outdoor installations FULL FRONTAL at their Nelson Street gallery location and Canada Line Roundhouse Station in Vancouver and, Richmond Art Gallery’s 2016 indoor site specific exhibition A Girls Gotta Do What a Girls Gotta Do.Lyse Lemieux was also included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s, Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasurestriennial exhibition in 2016-2017.

JULIANE OKOT BITEK is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her 100 Days(University of Alberta 2016) was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry. Juliane’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2017 National Magazine Awards for Poetry in Canada. Her poem “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and a chapbook with the same title, is due out in the fall 2019 from Nomados Press. Juliane is also the author of Sublime: Lost Words(The Elephants 2018). She was the Fall writer-in residence for The Capilano Review and the Spring 2019 writer-in residence at Capilano University.