Isabelle Menin | Sublime Nature
Isabelle Menin | Sublime Nature
April 24 – May 5, 2021
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Sublime Nature presents a curated survey of photographs by acclaimed Belgian artist Isabelle Menin, featuring select works drawn from series' produced over the last 5 years.
A maestra working with a painter's eye towards digital manipulation, Menin's highly-composed images masterfully layer fragments of exuberant colour, suggestions of forms and distorted, weeping blooms.
The flora and landforms of these imagined worlds, which Menin describes as "disordered landscapes", are individually documented, each flower skillfully lit, painstakingly captured and catalogued as part of the artist's expansive palette. These potent visual symbols act as the mode for Menin's mark-making — abstracted and reoriented, their petals and stems become a means to enact the artist's disembodied gestures.
Drawing parallels between "nature's strange complexity" and that of human nature, Menin's imagery is at once uncanny and beguiling, caught in a state of perpetual transformation. Transcribed with playful artifice and hybridized through her distinct aesthetic "hand", Menin subverts our understanding of her subject matter, unraveling their contextual meaning to render them anew.