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
