REVIEW: Bizarre Formations at the Lake Country Art Gallery
Posted by Lucas Glenn on November 16, 2014
Between October 8 and November 15 a playful but bizarre exhibition was held in the Lake Country Art Gallery. Through the Strange by Jill Ehlert and Stephanie Jonsson played with form, shape, and colours in ways that stretched the mind far beyond familiarity.
Jill Ehlert’s work particularly drew me in. Her drawings seemed confusingly composed and her collages even more so, with an intricate layering process. They were fun. Though I enjoyed her drawings, there was a Rauschenbergian majesty to her largest piece in the exhibition, LANDFORMS I. I couldn’t help but linger, intrigued by the interplay between found and artist-made textures.
Gorgeous! Disgusting. Beautiful. Repulsive! Gastly! Hot damn, that’s sexy.
Your intuition is certain to have strange conversations when looking at Ehlert’s imagery, especially when paired with Stephanie Jonsson’s sculptures. One artist’s work that came to mind was that of Patricia Paccinini, whose sculptures conjure up a reality that is simultaneously distant, close, and confounding.
Jonsson tows a line between what can be discerned, and what’s indiscernible. I felt like I was looking at sea anemones that had gotten a little too confrontational in their evolutionary processes; as though they had grown fur, or developed calloused textures, or sprouted legs.
All that to say that the exhibition was completely messed-up weird but all the more awesome because of it.
This exhibition ran at the Lake Country Art Gallery from Oct 8th to Nov 15th, 2014. More information about the exhibition can be found on the Lake Country Art Gallery website.