GENÈSE DE LA GLACE

An exhibition of Barbara Steinman
The exhibition runs from February 10 to March 12, 2000

Barbara Steinman's art practice began with an interest in video before she produced a number of site-specific works and installations, which occasionally included photography. Her works have always tackled fundamental human issues, generating multiple layers of meaning in a highly sophisticated yet minimalist aesthetic.

The present project, entitled Origins of Ice includes photographic works that are digitally assembled, sometimes covered in exploded or cracked glass as well as sculpted glass objects. Fragile and precarious, yet solid, not to say imposing, these assembled works suggest the changing nature, the transitory and provisional state of all things, the fragility of life itself.

In Double Blind, a middle-aged woman and man face away from each other and turn their backs on us. Imprisoned in shattered glass, which threatens to collapse at any moment, the two figures resist each other and embody the difficulty of all human relationships, including love. In Grace-note, a peaceful horizon extends above several layers of ice containing the carefully laid out clothes of an absent body. The cold and a feeling of total emptiness also inhabit another piece entitled Thin Ice: a thin partition splits the image like an almost permeable membrane between nature and culture. In Candle, ice and fire conflict in a dripping candle. Next to these photographic works stands a glass box, Houdini's Case. This window, in the style of presentation one might find in a museum of natural history, harbours a hammer and some finely chiselled glass nails. These tools from an impossible time evoke the infinitude of an ice age in continuous metamorphosis.

Barbara Steinman lives and works in Montréal. She has produced a number of site-specific works, some of them ephemeral, such as L'Imperceptible trajet, 1993, Hôtel-Dieu Chapel, Troyes, France; Let Freedom Ring, 1998, ICA/VitaBrevis, Boston, USA and Notion of Conflict, 1995, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Barbara Steinman is presently working on a permanent garden for Toronto's Opera Place. Her work is regularly presented at the Olga Karper Gallery (Toronto) and has beenincluded in a number of important group exhibitions: The Hand, 1999, The Power Plant, Toronto; About Place: Recent Art of the Americas, 1995, The Art Institute of Chicago; Beyond National Identity, 1995, shown in three Japanese museums, the Setagaya Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art and the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art. The Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, Great Britain), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina), the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Museum of Fine Arts of Canada (Ottawa) have all presented major individual exhibitions of her work.