Erga Gallery, from March 18 to 30, 2025
Curator: Victoria Leblanc
Photos: Adriane Balaban, Paul Litherland (Brainy Brood - the group picture)
- Color
- Black & White (upcoming)
- Lise-Hélène Larin
Species about to emerge - New generation
Lise Hélène Larin’s Espèce en voie d’apparition are strangely, compellingly contemporary. The artist has always tried, in her varied artistic projects, to go beyond what she knows, probing new territory and bucking the current trend. Now, while every twenty minutes an animal species disappears and dire warnings of further extinction make the headlines, Larin imagines otherwise – a species that might become.
While the artist’s past work spoke to ecological and aesthetic issues, as well as collective engagement, here we glimpse a fantastical world of interaction between species freed from rigid signifiers of identity. As noted, they are non-discriminate. They inhabit a blank white sheet of paper. They belong to no specific space or time. They are anonymous bundles of animation.
Onto these entities Larin projects emotions, states of being, an interconnectedness which has long been at the core of her démarche. They flirt, approach, pursue, challenge, stroll like flaneurs, dance, tease a kiss or an embrace. Their common denominator is communication, with us and/or with each other. That such odd and ribald shapes, mirrored after crumpled paper, could carry such a relational or emotional impact is a testament to the power of imagination.
And while we, the viewer or ‘spec-actor’, are no longer engaged in the physical making of the art object as we were for Larin’s forest, the lack of certainty about what we gaze upon invites us to indulge in our own imaginings of relationships between and communication with all manner of beings. Nothing is closed.
Beneath the playful aesthetic the artist embraces in Espèce en voie d’apparition, there lies, perhaps, a more subtle message. In a world increasingly intolerant of otherness and diversity, can imagination offer an antidote?
Victoria LeBlanc
