EMILY JAN: THE APOLOGUES
Sculptures
October 23rd – December, 11th 2017
Emily Jan is a Montréal-based artist and writer. Originally Californian, Jan has traveled to 35 countries and lived in four, including South Africa and Mexico. Her biophilic sculptures and installations combine everyday found objects with meticulously worked raw materials to evoke the faraway and the fantastical. As a wanderer, naturalist, and collector of objects and experiences, she is guided in her work by the spirit of exploration, kinship, and curiousity.
An apologue is a moral fable or allegory, particularly one that uses animals as its primary characters. The series is based upon two trips to the Amazon (2007 and 2015). A kind of ecological antipode to the North, the Amazonian Rainforest represents the apogee of biodiversity and complexity. Whereas the web of life in the North is sparsely elegant, at Equatorial latitudes it is impossibly tangled and complex. The work addresses both the ontological blur which exists between plant/animal/fungus and the temporal blur between living/dying/regenerating.
Photo: Guy L’Heureux and Emily Jan