Jade Rude at YYZ Gallery


This is a photo from a prior show, but at YYZ gallery Rude's gold aluminum mirror rhombohedrons are being shown in near-darkness and the effect is breathtaking. They look like debris from another, better planet, from utopia maybe, miraculously and mysteriously intact. Such beauty so coldly rendered.

From Sarah Robayo Sheridan's text on the exhibition:

"Gold mirror is a recurrent medium in Jade Rude’s installations. It is a material that evokes divergent affiliations: both the high-end optic technology of space missions but also a plastic world’s answer to consumer-grade luxury. Rude’s industrial sheeting offers a more glamorous update to the mirrored surfaces of earthworks of yore, while nevertheless following on the turnabout prompted by American minimalism that made industrial fabrication the new gold standard in art. Indeed, Rude’s favoring of conditions of installation in which “the physical body and surrounding architecture become enmeshed” aligns perfectly with the battle cry of minimalism in the 1960s. Yet in this particular foray, Rude also appropriates a specific image referent as her starting point - the mysterious solid that stars in Albrecht Dürer’s now five-centuries-old engraving Melencolia I (1514). Based on what most scholars agree to be a truncated rhombohedron rendered in the etching, Rude has extrapolated a three-dimensional structure that she deploys in modular repetition, stacking and distributing these units in clusters across the gallery space. The resulting rhombic building blocks are scaled to multiple sizes and are placed according to subjective decisions of arrangement that the artist has negotiated in relationship to the physical footprint of the gallery. The dispersal of the forms across the site is formally linked to phenomena of accrual and multiplication common in the natural landscape. The repeating units also offer refractions of the surrounding environment and its visitors framed in the mirrored facets of the solids, which act like prisms distributing light in a theatrical staging of the forms. The resulting installation balances between sculptural, pictorial and performative concerns - both carefully laid rock garden and hall of mirrors."

On til March 7