La Petite Mort gallery’s latest exhibition Be Not Still may be about man and water, but its main focus is on universal experience.
Curator Adèle Brazeau-Feeley said she wanted the exhibit to be accessible to the public.
“This exhibition is open to anyone, because the artists are all from different levels of artistic backgrounds and training. I was hoping anyone from the public could take something away,” she said.
Brazeau-Feeley is studying history and theory of art and arts administration in her fourth and final year at the University of Ottawa. She said she had been thinking about the idea of water and human life for a while before putting together the exhibit.
“The theme of water was constantly coming back to my mind and I was thinking of it in many ways,” she said.
“How Canada is bordered by water […] and we’re made of so much water biologically, and with all the disasters, how powerful water can be, especially with Hurricane Sandy in New York. Just all those ideas were coming to mind.”
She said she liked all the different perspectives people had on water and said she believes the artists were able to address those differences.
“Each artist took a different perspective,” she said. “Hannah [Nicholls]’ paintings are more narrative, Christopher Comeau’s are more landscape and Ruth [Stewart-Patterson]’s are more experimental and abstract.”
Stewart-Patterson used water, food colouring and time to create her photographs. She said she wanted to see how water could interact and react to the world around it.
She also continued with Brazeau-Feeley’s idea of accessibility, saying she hoped everyone could take something different and personal away from her photographs.
“Something very interesting is someone can see something super different than what I see,” Stewart-Patterson said. “So let’s say one piece I see a flower, someone else can see a person or a jellyfish. It’s very subjective.”
The 17-year-old from Montreal also said she hoped people could take a lesson away from the photographs.
Ottawa artist Christopher Comeau took a new turn on the art of photography, taking landscape photographs of the East coast.
Hannah Nicholls was the third artist to participate, using paint and mixed media to create a narrative about water. Like Brazeau-Feeley and Stewart-Patterson, she said it’s important that all people can connect to her pieces.
“I hope they have fun and can draw their own conclusions from it,” she said. “I try to leave a little ambiguity and I think it really does, when you look at all the pieces together, create a sort of story, so I’d like people to leave with that sense.”
Nicholls said she used her childhood memories from Newfoundland to create something “quirky” and “whimsical”.
This was Brazeau-Feeley’s first time curating, and she said she is really happy with the result, and the work the artists put in.
“They really all took a different perspective and made it their own,” she said. “They were true to their own style.”
The exhibit runs until Jan. 17.
