Exhibitions

Isabelle Menin | We Are Floating Worlds
January 11 - 25, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday January 11, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver is thrilled to open 2025 with We Are Floating Worlds, a new solo exhibition by Brussels, Belgium based photographic artist Isabelle Menin. This lush collection features works selected from Menin's three most recent series - Living Underground, Changing Moods, and Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene. Equally adept at photography and digital manipulation, Menin creates her iconic 'disordered landscapes' with layers of her original photographs and the desire to construct emotive alternate worlds, simultaneously vast and intimate.


Artist statement:

In creation there is something underground, mysterious, difficult to explain. Why does someone suddenly start creating something that no one asked them to do? This kind of free freedom is intriguing. We all, more or less consciously, choose our "mount" to travel through life. It is a bit like shamanism - we are stretched between the mysterious parts of ourselves and those of the universe.

Before showing one's work to others, there is first an intimate conversation with oneself; this inner dialogue is not linear or made of any straight lines. My images reflect this meandering path, this inner landscape, which is why I gave them all a general title: Disordered Landscapes. The landscape is often a vast thing and it seems interesting to me to associate it with something very intimate; a bit like an inversion of meaning.

All artists are passers-by, intercessors between the visible and invisible worlds. Art is the best mirror of what is not seen, said or shown. The Living Underground series is also that: what is hidden, underground, the dark, where life germinates. It is hiding to let things come to life in silence. Often there is another image below the final image that is shown, which I have covered with a layer that masks it. I like this idea of a life hidden under a life shown.

Regarding the series Be Careful with That Axe, Eugene, I gave it that title because of a song by Pink Floyd. My series titles generally come after the images, but I was working on the first image of this series when I heard this song by Pink Floyd from the album In a World Full of Flowers. I liked this telescoping between the words ‘pink’, ‘Eugene’ (a name dear to my heart), and ‘flowers’ at the moment when I added pink to an image. It is a series in which I approach things differently, where prolixity and abundance are defined more by lines and traces, like the geographical map of a world so beautiful in which we are so brutal and violent when we should be approaching it with much more care and love. We create to discover what we were looking for without knowing it yet - sometimes we receive answers before we even know the questions. It is beyond thought.

The series Changing Moods came to me while I was looking at Monet's series of cathedrals - the repetition of the pattern that differs according to the hours of the day, like the variations of our moods. Colours are emotions, emotions have colours. Our emotions are floating worlds. I worked on it at the same time as Be Careful with That Axe, Eugene - one series on a white background, the other on multi-colored backgrounds. They respond to each other; they are the two sides of the same apprehension of what surrounds us.

Happiness is cruel. Art consoles. We leave traces in the landscapes we cross and in those that cross us.   

- Isabelle Menin, January 2025

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Jamie Evrard | Time's Garden
September 14-28, 2024
Main Level | 3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday September 14, 2-4pm
Artist in Attendance
Artist Talk & Tour Saturday September 14, 2:15 - 2:30pm



Bau-Xi Gallery is proud to present atmospheric and immersive new paintings on both canvas and paper by established Vancouver-based artist Jamie Evrard. In addition to Evrard's signature floral imagery, her exhibition also features five paintings of the enigmatic dresses from the garden art installation “Four Seasons” by BC based textile artist Deirdre Phillips.

 
Evrard’s floral fascination has spanned virtually her entire career, continually driven by flowers’ contrasting qualities of unapologetic boldness, fragility and ephemerality. Whether focusing on a single blossom or celebrating a chaotic profusion of garden blooms, Evrard adeptly captures their shapes, lines and personalities with light and soft yet decisive strokes. Embracing a slightly deeper and richer palette for her sensitive observances of Vancouver's gardens and ponds and the quiet curiosities they harbour, the artist imbues her lush subjects with an air of late summer – still in full and glorious bloom, with a hint of the autumnal change to come.

Jamie Evrard has had over 75 solo exhibitions across the US and Canada and has been featured in over 65 group exhibitions since 1970.


Artist Statement:


It’s a Tuesday morning in mid August and I’m supposed to be writing the dread Artist’s Statement. Instead, I’m out on the deck watching bees busy randomly attacking my sunflowers, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. They’re in a hurry, and they have no game plan other than to gather as much nectar and pollen as possible.

I can relate. All winter when the bees were asleep, I might as well have been too. I painted but the light was too dim, and I had trouble making decisions and believing in my choices. A few starts, lots of destruction and restarts.

Eventually spring arrived, then summer, bringing with them the light. Almost delirious with joy and, finally, energy, I culled most of the remaining winter paintings and returned to my studio. I started a big painting of artichoke plants, then painted over them in peonies, then roses, then abandoned the unconcluded work and started over. Though ideas grew as rapidly as my new garden plants, they often became unwieldy and obstinate.

As summer progressed and my deadline approached, I began to do the bee thing, buzzing around to seven or eight new canvases more or less at random, working on each one in turn. I felt I could now make the decisions I needed to coax the paintings in the right direction. The studio looked like a house of cards, or maybe the way an overly abundant garden must look to a bee. Where to go first and what to do next!

When the days are bright I work this way - everything at once, very intuitive, and with one painting feeding the next. Many of these paintings have long stories behind them, layers upon layers of ideas that once veered off track or onto tangents before I finally righted them. Cannibalizing a big painting with large brushes is, in fact, one of the great joys of painting.

Delphiniums continue to fascinate me, the way they bend and drape in beautiful rhythms when they are at their ripest. Excuses for layers and layers of blues and purples. And I love the way a painting of water can take off in a completely unexpected way.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I need to stop writing and go paint.

-Jamie Evrard, 2024

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