Joani Tremblay

Landscape Gaze and Breezy Erudition, and What about Formal Freedom?

April 22 - June 4, 2016

Opening Reception: April 22nd, 7-9pm

Tremblay’s exhibition Landscape Gaze and Breezy Erudition, and What About Formal Freedom? explores the transfer between the physical experience of a place and the imaginings it conjures by endeavoring to re-create the “feel” of an existing place. In this work, she is interested in how we connect to and experience the feeling of powerful, emotionally loaded places – landscapes that have a particular mystical, ritual or historical significance. This specific installation draws inspiration from the Untermyer Garden in New York state: an elaborate, century-old garden founded by Samuel Untermyer, then a prominent lawyer and Jewish-rights advocate, and designed in the Beaux-Arts style at the turn of the century. Upon Untermyer’s passing, the gardens were endowed to the state, abandoned, and soon fell into neglect, becoming a neo-renaissance-styled shelter for transient people and a mystical site for conducting occultist rituals. For several days, Tremblay walked, sketched, photographed and collected minerals and flora from the park as source material for her work, while internalizing a distinct feeling invoked by the esoteric history, architectural details and abandoned, outgrown aesthetic of the gardens.