Au revoir – Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition


Main Gallery
Au revoir – Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition
Nadine Bariteau
October 16, 2015 – November 21, 2015

Artist Talk Time: 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Each year, Open Studio awards scholarship/fellowship residencies to artists of merit, as chosen through an annual juried selection process. The Nick Novak Fellowship is awarded to an artist currently involved with Open Studio as an artist member. In addition to rent-free access to Open Studio facilities for a period of one year, materials assistance, professional development assistance, and tuition-free access to Open Studio workshops, recipients present a solo exhibition of the work they have made during their tenure at Open Studio during our annual Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions. An artist’s talk accompanies the exhibition.

Nadine Bariteau’s Au revoir is an immersive installation that invites the viewer to enter a large, wood cylinder resembling a lighthouse. Once inside, light pulses and permits the viewer to experience two different sides of the work; one that is lit up and the other that appears in the darkness. Glow-in-the-dark ink has been used to create screenprinted shapes that emerge when the lights are off. Lighthouses illuminate dangerous points along a coastline, serving as an important navigational aid for sailors entering harbours. This exhibition marks the end of a long period of introspection following a car accident in which the artist lost her mother. In this work, the lighthouse represents the path that a person must take in order to continue in life even when difficulties arise. Au revoir is a visual metaphor that illustrates a farewell to a loved one and the process of letting go.

Born and raised in Montréal, Nadine Bariteau is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in printmaking, sculpture, installation and video performance. Her art practice is concerned with ephemerality as a defining feature of the natural world. Bariteau is interested in how water in particular, in its cyclical nature, illustrates this principle and how aquatic ecosystems populate the natural and urban landscapes that characterize her work. She is continuously employing the allegorical potential of landscapes and staging encounters within and against it. Bariteau is a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal and obtained her Masters of Fine Arts at York University in Toronto. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work can be seen in private and public collections including Foreign Affairs Canada and the National Library of Québec. Nadine has been living in Toronto for the past ten years. She is the 2014-15 recipient of Open Studio’s Nick Novak Fellowship.