October 26 - November 25, 2006

Sylvia Safdie | Recent Work | review
videos, installation and drawings

> opening Saturday, October 28 | 2 - 8pm

Reed, 2006 (30 mins loop), Assistant Editor: Brigitte Dajczer

Act/Shadow 2006 (11:03 mins)
Music: gentle rain preceeding mushrooms
(in memoriam John Cage)
Composed and Performed by:
Malcolm Goldstein

Reed, 2006 (30 mins loop), Assistant Editor: Brigitte Dajczer
Line 2006, Granite erth and mirror

The Cave of Making (A.H. Auden), 2006, continuous loop

Shaping No 12, 2006, graphite & oil on mylar, 42” x 81”
Shaping No 9, 2006, graphite & oil on mylar, 42” x 81”

Shaping No 15, 2006, graphite on mylar, 42” x 81”

Sylvia Safdie was born in Aley, Lebanon in 1942 and lived in Israel before moving to Canada in 1953. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Concordia University in 1975. Based in Montreal, her work has been exhibited in Canada, USA, Europe and China and has been acclaimed for its sensitive and thoughtful meditation on the transformative process, meaning and media.

This selection of Sylvia Safdie’s recent videos, installations and drawings demonstrate that she is once again extending her career-long investigation into issues of space, time and memory.

The video on Malcolm Goldstein titled Act/Shadow is not only a moving homage to the improvisational musician, but a stunning abstraction in its own right and one that is, like its complement Reed, 2006, wonderfully enigmatic and thought-provoking.

In the installation titled Line, 2006, Safdie uses only a mirror and a ribbon of black granite earth on the floor to make the viewer an active participant in her work and an accomplice in the making of meaning there.

The new series of graphite and oil on mylar paintings Shaping, 2006 mark a watershed in the artist’s work. At first seemingly abstract, they are gradually perceived as having a vibrant noumenal life, with textures that suggest embryonic membrane, scar tissue and inner plenitude.

These ‘thought forms’ are the abstract flipside to her earlier series of paintings titled Heads, and are just as enigmatic and engaging.

Safdie's art has always celebrated both the soil and the soul and, in these new works, demonstrates that her ambiguous forms are grounded in ongoing memory-work and reflection.

James Campbell
October 2006