I research sites where I am planning installations to unearth cultural readings that are part of the space of awareness, the way we relate to a place being influenced by what we’ve heard about it, accumulated knowledge or hearsay being part of what’s “in the air” in so-called empty space. my Darling was made to accompany my exhibition/installation of the same name at the Darling Foundry, Montreal where I worked from what I learned of its architecture, history and geography in the context of a newly-gentrified neighbourhood. The challenge was to bring what I was learning about its past lives into the way we see that place now. To give the immense space more intimacy, I suspended lengths of clear elastic thread to hang ceiling to floor in shimmering lines through which one could walk, touching the space overhead through the lines. Long gone historical figures, rivers, and others who formerly enlivened that place were given a flickering place with name tags made of clear acetate, their backgrounds sketched out in the book. Folded, accordian-style pages with wrap-around cover recall the historical maps from which I gleaned much of my information about the area, with the Darling site pinpointed as a pinhole in printed fragments of these maps. An elastic thread slips through these hole-markers, tenuously holding the folding pages together while marking place. Selected information about each historical person or place is included, along with possible routes taken at the time by these ones now lost.

Available from: http://karileefuglem.com (online Spring 2012)

Originally from BC and living in Montreal since 1989, Karilee Fuglem makes art that is informed by a heightened sensitivity to the subtleties of nonverbal communication that underscores life in a bilingual city. Sometimes constructed with thread nearly as invisible as the space it describes, or familiar materials made magical by being re-imagined, her artwork speaks a subterranean language of light, movement and visceral sensation. It is rooted in a spatial, historical and geographical understanding of the environment in which it is situated. Fuglem makes artist books in parallel to her installations, drawings, sculpture and video work, using formats which elicit a physical understanding of text- and image-based research. Her work has been widely exhibited, most recently in the 2011 Montreal Biennial. In 2010 she presented Conversations with Light and Air at Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, BC as well as Steady Streams, Living Rooms at Rodman Hall St Catharines, Ontario. Other site-specific installations include the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ontario (2009), Koffler Gallery, Toronto (2008), the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2006), Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2003) and Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2001). Her work is in collections at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, as well as private collections, and is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.