Lorna Bauer
In her practice, Lorna Bauer utilizes photography and sculpture to examine human’s relationships to their surroundings. Bauer’s projects are generally characterized as site-related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context and speaks to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments. Bauer uses exclusively analogue technology as it provides a set of limitations to achieve an economy of form. She also understands documentary genres as a series of conventions that can be put toward other poetic means. The sequences of photographs are meant to make the viewer aware of his/her presence at the threshold of the depicted space, and the exhibition site. The sculptural object becomes a middle term in this equation, although it can sometimes depart from its syntactic relationship to the images and become autonomous.
Lorna Bauer's investigations of specific sites have summoned references as diverse as Le Corbusier's conflicted relationship with documentary photography, Eileen Gray's historically charged Villa on the French Riviera, Arthur Erickson's phenomenology of dwelling, Walter Benjamin's love letters describing the flora and fauna of Ibiza, the history of mushroom cultivation in the underground catacombs of Paris, the conservation efforts of Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and botanical illustrator Margaret Mee.
Biography
Lorna Bauer was born in Toronto in 1980 and now lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad. She has been artist-in-residence at Despina in Rio de Janeiro, The Couvent des Récollets in Paris, the Quebec-New York Residency, Banff Centre and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her works are present in public and private collections, notably the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Writing on Lorna Bauer’s work has been featured in numerous publications such as Artforum, Canadian Art, C-Magazine, Le Devoir among other media outlets. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Montréal Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts. In 2019, the artist was awarded the Barbara Sphor Memorial Award and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award.
Recent exhibitions
| 2022 | Éclater le plafond de verre, group exhibition, Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, CA Material Knowledge, group exhibition, Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York, USA Awakening: seeing beyond the frame, group exhibition, Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, CAN |
| 2021 | Air Is Where Effort Goes, solo exhibition, Nicolas Robert Gallery, Toronto, CA Sobey Art Award 2021, finalist Air Is Where Effort Goes, solo exhibition, Nicolas Robert Galerie, Toronto, CAN Parallax, (w. Vikky Alexander), solo exhibition, Galerie Ephemere, Montréal, CAN Sobey Art Award, National Gallery, Ottawa, CAN Still Daylight, group exhibition, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto, CAN A Temple Most August, group exhibition, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, CAN Des Horizons D’Attente, group exhibition, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, CAN |
| 2020 | A Blown Glass Trash Can, A Silk Sack for a Tire, group exhibition, Trilobite et le Pneu, Montréal, CA |
| 2018 | Tools for Idlers, solo exhibition, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal, CA The Hand of Mee, solo exhibition, Franz Kaka Gallery, Toronto, CA |
| 2024 | Déliquescence, group exhibition, Fonderie Darling, Montréal Sunday is Violet, solo exhibition, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto, CAN A Tale of Fleeting Moments, group exhibition, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal, CAN Chapitre 111, inaugural group exhibition, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal, CAN |