Nicole Malbeuf lives and works in Toronto and is a student at OCAD. Rooted in her studies of fashion design and textile, her artwork explores materiality, assemblage and technical processes. Nicole works across disciplines and to articulate concepts and narratives metaphorically, exploring themes such as nature, place, identity and memory.
A Place of a Place of a (Once Real) Place negotiates the distance between landscape and place, reflecting on contemporary notions of identity. The work subverts tropes in landscape art with elements of the local, personal and informal. The customized landscapes neither depict something fixed nor universal, but demonstrate a transient experience of place.
Methods of garment construction (darts, panels, seams) and surface design (digitally-printed cloth, chemical surface treatment, embroidery) applied to these landscapes dismantle their formal qualities and their potential to be idealized. Instead, they can better be understood in terms of temporality and memory. With the degradation of the printed image, the work engages in both acts of erasure and renewal to preserve and relinquish. Ultimately the work seeks to reconcile with the transience of experiencing place and create a portrait of an attribute of the contemporary: a landscape that is obviously fabricated, integrally fragmented and seamlessly whole.
Co-Curated by Helena Frei & Chris Mitchell Hard Twist 9 Fibre Optics – Textiles in the Digital Age plugs into the juncture where textile connects with computer technology and exposes how the digital touches cloth. On view August 28 to December 28, 2014 on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Hotel.