Jen Aitken

2 VOLUMES
09.08–10.15.2016
Room 1

For the past several years, Toronto artist Jen Aitken has created small-scale, concrete floor sculptures. While not exactly maquettes, these sculptures could be thought of as improbable architecture or futurist buildings with parts that reference familiar elements from our environment. Upon closer examination, the concrete reveals a certain pictorial quality embedded within the raw materiality of the medium.

A liquid foam that can be tinted has been added to the concrete mixture, leaving traces of colour that seem to surge from within. In this body of work, as with others before it, Aitken draws references to art history and architecture, namely Brutalist architecture. This movement favoured the use of concrete in its raw, unmodified form. In Aitken’s work, however, the medium’s flexible nature allows her to play with texture and colour to create abstract and sensual forms. For CLARK, Aitken explores a new way of occupying space with her installation titled 2 volumes. If the title seems to describe what viewers will find in the gallery, the work as a whole resists any instantaneous reading. To begin with, the room is completely dark and the sculptures are encased in fabric. This set up lends a certain ghostly presence to the two massive forms. The fabric’s surface is raw and textured, much like the concrete Aitken normally uses. Within this darkness, the fabric seems to recede, allowing the shape and volume of the two pieces to emerge.

2 volumes is the artist’s first attempt at working on a large scale.[1] However, this body of work fits well within the continuum of the artist’s formal vocabulary, which she has further honed in recent years. Aitken considers her work “as being simultaneously masses that occupy space and shells that contain space.”[2] There are the masses, the objects that take up room within the space, but also everything that surrounds them, including the viewer. This negative space allows a relationship to form between the two elements, but it also imposes a path onto the viewer, who must navigate and contemplate this work one section at a time, never fully seizing it as a whole.

Manon Tourigny / translation : Jo-Anne Balcaen

[1] Each piece measures 7 feet high by 8 feet wide by 10 feet deep.

[2] Excerpt from an email sent by the artist on July 17, 2016