September 09 - October 09 , 2004

Sylvia Safdie | Works | review

> opening Saturday, September 11  | 2 - 6pm

Head #1 earth, linseed oil on mylar 2003 81”/42.5”

installation view - room 1

Untitled wood & Head #8 earth, linseed oil on mylar 2003 installation view

Circles 1 video 2004
Circles 2 Music: John Heward video 2004

Spear 1 m/m 15’/4” 2003
Spear 2 m/m 14’/4” 2003
Spear 3 m/m 11.5’/3” 2003

Spear 2 m/m 14’/4” 2003 fragment

Spears & Pods installation view room 2

Sylvia Safdie was born in Aley, Lebanon, in 1942 and spent her early years in Haifa, Israel. She moved to Canada with her family in 1953. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in 1975. Since then, she has been a practicing visual artist living and working in Montreal. Sylvia Safdie has exhibited both nationally (Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, among others) and internationally: in the United States (New York, Chicago, Miami, San Diego), in Europe (London, Paris, Copenhagen, Geneva) and East Asia (Beijing). Her most recent solo exhibitions have included Autres Territoires (Centre culturel canadien, Paris, 2000), Reflections (Peak Gallery, Toronto, 2001) and Extensions (Tom Thompson Memorial Gallery, Owen Sound, ON, 2002), The Inventories of Invention (Galerie d’art Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montréal, 2003), The Testimonies of Trees (Firehouse Gallery, Burlington, Vemont, 2004)

The exhibition explores the full range of Sylvia Safdie's recent work: paintings, sculptures, installations and video.

The exhibition revolves around the series of paintings titled Heads. In this series, the artist explores the human head -- and the human condition. Each is a unique moment of vision and an icon of pure interiority. These eloquent heads seem to have an inner life, as they emerge into the foreground and simultaneously recede into the backdrop. Unsettling, the work is hard to turn away from, reminding us of Rilke's words from the first of the Duino Elegies: "For the beautiful is nothing/but the beginning of the terrifying..."

In this core body of work, Safdie employs a simple yet vital and expressive technique. She mixes linseed oil and samples of earth which she has collected from places during her travels. So the work is literally of the earth, but also a potent metaphor for transformation

Safdie is an artist who gathers and preserves traces of the past and of nature, traces that her viewers have lost or missed, and then unveils them as being none other than our own.

Safdie's has always been an art of haunting ambiguity, grounded in the work of memory. The works in this exhibition demonstrate once again that it is also, and more importantly, a powerful affirmation of the fully human.

James Campbel