Fall 2018 exhibition season

The Power Plant concludes 2018 with four new exhibitions on view from October 20 to December 30. The Fall 2018 season presents exhibitions by artists Vivian Suter with Elisabeth Wild, Karla Black, Beth Stuart and Abbas Akhavan.

Vivian Suter with Elisabeth Wild
La Canícula

Curator: Nabila Abdel Nabi

Vivian Suter’s works are partnerships; with the mud, rain, insects that crawl across the soil and the avocados and mangos that drop from the trees surrounding her home in Panajachel, Guatemala. These elements and more work in concert with Suter’s own marks upon the canvas, which are inspired by her remarkable natural surroundings: since 1983, Suter has lived on the site of a former coffee plantation along the shores of Lake Atitlán, itself nestled in-between a ring of sweeping, verdant hills and volcanoes. When Hurricane Stan (2005) and Tropical Storm Agatha (2010) flooded her studio and left watermarks across all her canvases, the artist began to embrace the unpredictability of her natural surroundings. Since then, Suter has moved her canvases between the indoors and outdoors, allowing the constantly changing weather to commingle with her process. By layering broad swaths of vivid colour on raw canvas to create gestural forms, Suter evokes the wildness and luminosity of her adopted home. In this way, her paintings operate both as references to and direct traces of their environment.

The exhibition will also feature newly commissioned collages by Suter’s mother, Elisabeth Wild, who, like Suter, is also making her Canadian debut. Around twenty years ago, Wild bought an extension of her daughter’s coffee plantation in Panajachel and has been living near Lake Atitlán since. Wild has worked in several media over the years, but collage-making has become her primary medium. The act of cutting and reassembling from the pages of glossy magazines is a daily meditative exercise for the artist, in which she formulates new landscapes and iconographies—what she calls Fantasías. These works are self-contained universes, operating in the realm of Surrealism by drawing from the natural world without referring to it.

Karla Black

Curator: Nabila Abdel Nabi

Karla Black’s sculptures hover between sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, challenging easy categorization. Her work comprises traditional art-making media including pigment, plaster and paint alongside everyday substances such as eye shadow, Vaseline, lipstick, cotton wool and toilet paper. Black thus draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions, including expressionist painting, land art, performance and formalism. Materials are suspended in space or carefully arranged on the floor to produce a multisensory, visceral experience.

The artist is concerned with the physical properties and aesthetic possibilities of the materials she works with, rather than their symbolic or cultural connotations. Hers are self-contained gestures, not intended to draw associations with elements in the external world. In particular, Black regards language as a secondary framework to the deeply material, affective experience that her sculptures evoke. Her simultaneously delicate and monumental works often reveal traces of the artist’s process on their surface—such as fingerprints and dust—and are therefore encountered as both sculpture and site, an experimental approach that enables her audience to engage with the materials differently and encourages new ways of looking at the spaces they activate. For her exhibition at The Power Plant, the artist will produce a new site-specific, immersive sculpture that engages with the particular spatial and light qualities of the gallery. 

Beth Stuart
Length, Breadth, Thickness and—Duration

Curator: Justine Kohleal, RBC Curatorial Fellow

Length, Breadth, Thickness and—Duration by Toronto-based artist Beth Stuart presents a body of new work that expands from the inside of the gallery towards Lake Ontario. At the core of the exhibition is a critical engagement with the Victorian-era bathing machine, which emerged as members of the European gentry began to take to the seaside. The placement of Stuart’s Bathing Machine (2018) next to Lake Ontario not only refers to its original purpose, it also speaks to Stuart’s interest in the reclamation of public space by unruly bodies and ideas that push back against established norms. Whereas the Victorian bathing machine represents an oppressive architecture of control and exclusion, the artist’s Bathing Machine becomes a reflexive, self-critical structure open to new uses and interpretations. 

Inside the gallery, the bathing machine is further deconstructed and placed in dialogue with the garment patterns of 20th century French fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet. Most famous for the invention of the bias cut, Vionnet’s clothes were designed to cling to, rather than squeeze, the body. She was also responsible for developing some of the first transitional beach fashion for women, referred to as pyjamas de plage. In conjunction with the Bathing Machine, Stuart’s plaster sculptures recalling Vionnet’s patterns ask us to reconsider the aesthetic and moral codes from the past and how they persist in the spaces we inhabit today.

Abbas Akhavan
variations on a landscape

Curator: Carolin Köchling, Assistant Curator: Nabila Abdel Nabi

Abbas Akhavan’s practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance. The domestic sphere, as a forked space between hospitality and hostility, has been an ongoing area of research in his practice. More recent works have shifted focus, wandering onto spaces and species just outside the home—the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes.

In his work variations on a landscape the artist uses a round fountain to alter the decentralized space of the gallery’s high and narrow Clerestory. Working against the institution’s rigid architectural symmetry, recalling the grid so prevalent in North American cities, the installation aims to give way to a circular point for gathering, one that reflects on the role of an art institution, one that might offer a communal space for contemplation. 

The exhibition will be evolving over the Fall season, taking into consideration elements outside the white cube, allowing the visitor’s experience in the space to be shaped by the seasons, the time of day and the weather conditions. Akhavan has invited six writers and artists to contribute a text to the installation. Each text will be introduced to the physical space on a monthly basis. The exhibition will be evolving over the Fall season.

Support for La Canícula includes Presenting Donor: Koerner Foundation; Supported by GAGA Mexico City & Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, Karma International, STAMPA.

Support for Karla Black includes Lead Donor: Partners in Art (PIA); Supported by: Galerie Gisela Capitain, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Modern Art. 

Support for variations on a landscape includes Presenting Donor: Nancy McCain & Bill Morneau; Major Donor: Nadir & Shabin Mohamed

Admission at The Power Plant is all year, all free, presented by BMO Bank of Montreal.

Director: Gaëtane Verna

Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday 10am–5pm
Thursday 10am–8pm
Friday–Sunday 10am–5pm 

Media contact
media@thepowerplant.org / T +1 416 973 4927