Room 1

Hannah Doerksen

Making a Religion Out of One’s Loneliness

EXHIBITION /
SEPTEMBER 6 TO OCTOBER 12, 2019

OPENING /
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 5PM

ARTIST TALK /
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 5H30PM

An exhibition presented in collaboration with MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image.
Curator: María Wills Londoño, in collaboration with Audrey Genois and Maude Johnson

Hannah Doerksen creates immersive installations in which staging and subterfuge allow for unexpected experiences and encounters. Addressing notions of loneliness and desire, she imagines alternative gathering places.

In the exhibition MAKING A RELIGION OUT OF ONE’S LONELINESS, Doerksen presents a sanctuary of solitude inspired by spaces in which art and spirituality are united, such as the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Configured as a church interior, the installation combines a place of worship and a waiting room. Playing on mystical contemplation, Doerksen explores our ritualistic relationships with images and objects.  

She is interested in the redemptive role of objects in situations that isolate the human being, opening a door to their possible social existence. Furthermore, as second-hand objects are laden with the lives of the different people who possessed them, they become companions, as though embodying the very people whose company they kept.

Scenes compiled by the artist from films, television programs, the web, and her daily life are shown on screens. The image here helps to construct desire, becoming in its turn an object of worship or envy. Although Doerksen’s sanctuary encourages us to mourn the objects we have left behind, the mere presence of the images compensates for their physical loss.

MAKING A RELIGION OUT OF ONE’S LONELINESS is a still life in which our simultaneously impermanent and immutable existence takes on a surreal dimension tinged with the emotional charge specific to the object. No longer knowing whether the human or the object suffers the greater degree of loneliness, visitors experience a subtle but unsettling vertigo.

- María Wills Londoño & Maude Johnson

 



BIO

Hannah Doerksen is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Calgary. Her projects have been presented in exhibitions throughout Canada, including at Untitled Art Society (Calgary), the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto), the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), and the Esker Foundation (Calgary). In 2017, she was nominated for the Sobey Art Award.