{"id":36336,"date":"2017-03-17T13:35:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T18:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/?page_id=36336\/"},"modified":"2022-11-29T19:34:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T00:34:49","slug":"this-mountain","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/jessica-houston\/this-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"This Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"
May 6 \u2013 June 17, 2017
\nOpening reception: Saturday, May 6, 2017 from 3-5 p.m.
\nJessica Houston: This Mountain
\nArt M\u00fbr, Montreal (QC)<\/p>\n

Text by L. Sasha Gora<\/p>\n

Jessica Houston\u2019s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else?<\/p>\n

Her second solo show at Art M\u00fbr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine coll\u00e9 prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north.<\/p>\n

An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions\u2014breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling\u2014disrupt and transform the paintings\u2019 surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild\u2014scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow\u2014they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made.<\/p>\n

Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine coll\u00e9 prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent.<\/p>\n

Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior\u2014peeling wallpaper, a rusted stove\u2014is juxtaposed with the soft glow of a yellow circle. This continues Houston\u2019s ongoing use of colour to question the particulars of perception.<\/p>\n

Heritage of All, White with Greed and Iron, and The Spaces we Breath, Houston\u2019s titles read like lines of a haiku. Composed as prose, they are also confrontational, mapping out the cultural and environmental impacts of the extraction of resources in the Arctic. We witness scenes of violent decay, and yet simply carry on, like Business As Usual. In What Nations Come and Go a pale purple oval nearly fills the frame, revealing only in the very far right a simple cabin in front of a rocky incline. A similar imposing cloud of colour, this time blue, dominates the landscape in Mapped, Claimed, and Evaluated.<\/p>\n

The north is just as much an idea as it is a place, and is one that looms large in the Canadian imagination. There are few better examples than Glenn Gould\u2019s The Idea of North: \u201cBut like all but a very few Canadians . . . I\u2019ve had no direct confrontation with the northern third of our country . . . the north has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about sometimes, and, in the end, avoid.\u201d1 But Houston has gone north. The north she depicts is not faraway. It is no longer convenient to just dream about. The north Houston shows us is one that wears the signs of climate change and pollution, of the extraction of natural resources and the colonization of peoples. Houston\u2019s north is uncertain and fragile, and warrants as close of a look as we can get.<\/p>\n

1. Gould, Glenn. \u201aThe Idea of North.\u2019 Glenn Gould\u2019s Solitude Trilogy: Three Sound Documentaries. Toronto: CBC, 1992.
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