Karilee Fuglem Articles etc.
Connective Tissue
Crevier, Lyne. Ici, Filer l'ange, May 19 - 25, 2005, p44
Tousignant, Isa. Hour, Artlist, April 28th, 2005, p18
Redfern, Christine. The Mirror, Look Again, 28 avril - 4 mai, 2005 Vol. 20 No. 44
Simon, Kim. Canadian Art Magazine, Rewind: Karilee Fuglem, Winter 2002, p89-90
Some day soon you'll stop searching for meaning, an exhibition last summer by Karilee Fuglem, highlights the permeable boundary between learned ways of seeing in a gallery space and the movement of our viewing body as we negotiate the world. Implicit in her exhibition title is a gift to viewers: a release from the desire to come to some final truth about that which is seen. What is at first so striking about Fuglem's new work is that it is barely visible.
Occupying the gallery's main space, Secret Visibility consists of small hand-cut discs of acetate on short lengths of fishing line, inserted into the wall in undulating masses. The work catches your eye when it flickers in the breeze of six small household fans on individual timers placed overhead, making the discs reflect what little light passes into the room from adjoining spaces. Between the play of the constructed breeze and the viewer's own moving body, the installation often shifts in and out of light, compelling one to sometimes move up against the wall in hope of seeing more. The act of looking becomes a performance as one walks the periphery of the room in a movement somewhere between struggle and dance. In the gallery's back room Untitled (snow/blind) , a large ink-jet print on hanging polyester, sways in a corner. Dramatically lit by a lamp standing directly in front of it, the work is obscured by shadow if one gets too close. In trying to get near enough to read the image—a textural surface with the appearance of a pixelated rock face—one has to keep changing perspective. Vision is acutely connected to the way one moves, and the work eventually reveals small holes in the fabric that direct light onto the wall behind.
A series of Water Drawings insists again that looking is an active, ongoing process. Seemingly immediate, like unconscious, obsessive phone doodles, these ghostly images on rag and tracing paper hold the record of the artist's movements over the surface with a brush and clean water. The result is quiet and contemplative abstract works where the paper surfaces gather, puff and almost emboss Fuglem's gestures in the process of drying. The work reflects Fuglem's longstanding interest in the peripheral, her belief that things barely glimpsed have a reality to be acknowledged. More than this, the experience of searching and catching glimpses has an unexpected emotional impact. "Some day soon you'll stop searching for meaning" becomes about learning how to look, about being asked to pay attention. Fuglem's barely visible works compel one to look again, and see differently each time.
Delgado, Jérôme. La presse, Montrer de l'air - Karilee Fuglem rend visible l'invisible, June 7, 2002 p. C7
Tomas Jonsson, Karilee Fuglem: Cumulous, Summer 2001, p.40-41.
John K.Grande, Art Papers, November/December 2000, p.56.
David Liss, Luminous Life, Canadian Art, Fall 2000, pp.50-53.
Eleanor Heartney, Report from Montreal: Quotidian Art in Quebec Art in America,
February 1999, p.48-51.
David Liss, Rip Away (Of Fire and Passion) Canadian Art, Spring 1998, p.106.
Laurel Woodcock, Karilee Fuglem - Galerie Optica, Montreal(ill.) C Magazine,
May-August, 1997 (no53), p.49.
Jennifer Couëlle, Jayce Salloum - Karilee Fuglem - Karin Trenkel (ill.) Art
Press, March 1997 (no222), p.69-71.
Valérie Lamontagne, Résider(ill.) C Magazine, Fall 1995, p.44.