At Hangar 7826 in Villeray, Montreal, Karen Trask and Paul Litherland present Sub Merge, an exhibition exploring life on and below the water’s surface.

Paul presents a series of quick sketches of marine life created while scuba diving. Using a waterproof drawing support and a pencil, he draws the fish, octopuses, sea slugs, and worms he encounters, occasionally offering them an opportunity to respond to their portrait. Drawing under water comes with many physical challenges like dealing with currents, the cold, the thickness ofneoprene gloves, the effects of depth on perception, reduced visibility, – all part of the mix that makes this way of making art attractive to the artist.

Karen Trask’s series of small clay figurines depicts swimmers in mid-motion, exploring the interplay between human form and water.  Each figure highlights the fluidity and resistance of movement—the reach of a stroke, muscles stretching, heads turning for breath, and the delicate balance between buoyancy and gravity. Her attraction to working with clay is in finding connections between the liquid and solid states of the material and the experience of swimming.

Learning how to swim was a question of survival for Trask, a metaphor for navigating a difficult period in her childhood. The clay swimmers are both vulnerable and resilient. This work reflects a longing to merge with the water, to lose the boundaries between body and sea.

Français

Karen Trask et Paul Litherland présentent l’exposition Sub Merge, une exploration de la vie sur et sous l’eau.

Paul Litherland propose une série de croquis esquissés lors de plongées sous-marines. Sur un support imperméable (du polypropylène), il dessine les poissons, pieuvres, vers et limaces de mer qu’il rencontre. Dessiner sous l’eau comporte de nombreux défis physiques à surmonter. Il faut composer avec les courants et le froid, l’épaisseur du néoprène des gants, les effets de la profondeur sur la perception et la visibilité réduite, etc; ces difficultés n’en rendent l’activité que plus attrayante pour l’artiste.

Tandis qu’elle façonne de petites sculptures en argile, Karen Trask explore l’interaction entre la forme humaine et l’eau. Ces figurines, qui représentent des nageurs en action, suggèrent la fluidité du mouvement mais aussi la résistance rencontrée. Elles évoquent la portée d’un mouvement de crawl, l’étirement des muscles, la rotation des têtes pour respirer, et le délicat équilibre entre gravité et flottabilité. Dans ce travail avec l’argile, Trask cherche des liens entre les états liquide et solide du matériau et l’expérience de la natation.

Pour Trask, apprendre à nager fut une question de survie, une métaphore pour traverser une période difficile de son enfance. Ses nageurs en argile, à la fois vulnérables et résistants, reflètent son désir de se fondre dans l’eau, d’éliminer les frontières entre le corps et la mer.

Amoureux dans la vie, Paul Litherland et Karen Trask sont aussi directeurs de Produit Rien, un espace projet pour les artistes dans la Petite Italie.

Traduction: Francine Lalonde

We began with a deliberately generous definition of ‘artist”, and put together a list of all the people we knew lived, or had a studio, within a 400 meter circle around  the gallery on Marconi street.  As we contacted people on the initial list we asked them to suggest other people. The initial list of perhaps a dozen people rapidly grew to over forty! Given the size of the gallery, it quickly became clear that we should install the show in Salon Style.

The city’s formal urban planning description for this area in the early 2000’s is rumoured to have been “Wild Mixture”. Since the mid- 2000s, the area has undergone waves of invasive development. The development over the last 20 years has tended to even out the idiosyncrasies and delightful strangeness of the area. All the same, we propose that some of this character remains stubbornly resistant to being tamed. We hope that the exhibition reaffirms, through the variety and vivacity of the works shown, that the wildness is still alive and well.

The organizing committee:

Lynn Hughes, Francine Lalonde, Paul Litherland, Karen Trask.

The backs of the works reveal a plethora of information not found on the front, with all the practical matters of artwork manufacture and presentation leaving their traces. There are marks from the stretcher makers, the restorers/conservationists, auctioneers, collection managers, collectors, the transporters and accidents. This project is a tribute to the collective effort of many hands that guide a work into our consciousness.

The photographs are printed to the same scale as the original works and mounted on to the stretchers as one would mount a canvas. Through this act, the artist is imbuing  the photographs with a desire to become “real” art objects. That they may already be real art objects is not really the point. The photographs don’t feel like they quite belong in that world. You can almost hear them whispering Pinocchio’s mantra:

Fake it till you make it

The exhibition was planned just as the Covid-19 lockdown hit Montréal. The artists organized a protocol so that single viewers could visit the show following public health guidelines.

Virtual Tour

*click on the three dots to go full screen

47 Storeys is one such vital story. In 1996 Paul Litherland went to a bar at the top of a very tall building, drank a beer, waited until the other patrons and staff left, then parachuted into the night-time sky, landing safely on the street to the astonishment of two late-night revelers. Three months after the jump, afraid of forgetting significant details, Paul commemorated his adventure to video. 20 years later Paul revisits the event with Monique Moumblow. They re-edit the original 43 minutes tape down to 11 minutes. Paul then attempts to re-enact his original mediated performance. On one screen we see Paul who sits, listens to himself through headphones, and speaks over his original narrative. On a second screen Paul attempts to duplicate his original performance word-for-word and gesture-by-gesture. On the third screen is the edited original. These three different renditions of the tale, from 3 different moments in time, are almost the same, but they never perfectly align. No matter how much we practice, the story is never exactly as it was.

47 Storeys is a brilliant and slightly comedic rendition of the “performative act of memory -making” (Kuhn). Narrating the past re-activates and catapults memories into the present, often with the help of souvenirs such as the video-tape and parachute equipment that Paul still keeps in his care. Paul’s fumbling narrative recollections lay bare this performative process of memory-making as past and present collide in a single temporal moment superbly visualized in this 3 channel video.

In the re-telling of this vital story grey-haired, bespectacled Paul moves in imperfect harmony with his former self. This temporal collision invites reflection upon both memory re-enactments, story-telling and the vagaries of ageing: “the permanently fluctuating relationships between younger and older selves” (Segal). We see, hear and feel these fluctuations, experiencing a vertigo of narrative mediation: Paul’s post-hoc memory is rendered into story and captured on video tape, which is then digitally remastered in the present for the future. It is the absence of documentation of the original event –no pictures, photos or go-pro video– that makes the re-telling of the story so necessary and so compelling. Thankfully, Paul lived to tell the tale, again and again.

Monique Moumblow is a video artist and a fan of spectacular storeys.

Paul Litherland is a gentleman adventurer, a closet scuba diver in a room full of wingsuiters.

Author: Kim Sawchuk (professor et director of Ageing-Communication-Technologies, Université Concordia)

“Gravité brings together photographs and videos by Rachel Echenberg and Paul Litherland. Astonishing, puzzling, secretive – what do these works signify? What narratives propel these enigmatic images? Both artists immerse themselves in compelling situations, positioning their bodies as barometers of the spirit and of the mind. Each of their invented actions demands a response. Inner and outer self engage in a fascinating interchange; gravity meets resistance. The title of this exhibition has a double meaning that applies equally to these works. While gravity exerts itself, pulling us towards the earth, the term also alludes to the tone of thoughtfulness that pervades these works. Combining serious play and humourous invention these images propose a deeper significance that arouses imaginative speculation.” – Lorraine Simms, Curator

A soundtrack of rock-and-roll drumbeats and synthesized noises parallels the fliers’ aimless trajectories; the drums launch forth on promising starts, but falter and peter out.

Vertigo and peril are never far off. Given the large monitors mounted on the ceiling above, the sense of restrained peril invades even the installation materials themselves. The wind tunnel propelling the fliers cannot be seen, but a temporary suspension from gravity is being tested, both by the flyers and the monitors themselves. The universal order represented in the Sistine Chapel is here inverted: no divine covenant, just a careen through the clouds—provisional, precarious, unmoored.

text: Edwin Janzen