Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie: Veils of a Bog

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Vanessa Brown & Michelle Helene Mackenzie, "Veils of a Bog," 2018

photo: John Dean. Image courtesy of the artists.

Opening: September 13 @ 7 - 9pm

Peaty and tannic, soft and saturated with water, a bog is place brimming with life forms, yet built up on a bed of decay. Veils of a Bog is a collaboration between artists Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie that combines Brown’s material practice in sculpture with Mackenzie’s multi-channel sound composition Post Meridiem. Slowly rotating in a dark gallery, three steel armatured mobiles, clad with paper, fabric, leaves and moss are suspended in an aural wash of crickets, toads, birds and a blanket of droning tones to imagine the bog as a meditative and regenerative place.

In her sculptures, Brown often uses steel as the primary material. Eschewing its heavy, industrial connotations, Brown wields sheets of metal into light, pliable forms, at times figurative, and at other times more abstract, with form being defined more by line and silhouette than by mass and volume. With Veils of a Bog, an armature of steel rods is used to support collaged elements as hanging sculptures that don't so much represent a bog as they evoke it. In Michelle Helene Mackenzie's composition that accompanies Brown's sculptural forms, the sounds most representative of a bog—the chirps of crickets and frogs—cascade down from the ceiling where they are enveloped in a four-channel drone.

Together, Brown and Mackenzie's work presents the bog as a comforting space, the lights are set at a warm, dim glow and the gallery is furnished with soft seating allowing viewers to literally sink into the space. But as calming as the environment is, Brown and Mackenzie's bog is also a space of ambivalence, echoing the tension inherent in an ecosystem where an abundance of rotting organic matter teems with life.

Veils of a Bog was produced for Vanessa Brown's solo exhibition The Witching Hour, which opened at Calgary's Esker Foundation in May, where it received support from the Esker Foundation Commission Fund. The installation is coming to the Western Front fresh from the exhibition in Calgary, giving Brown and Mackenzie's hometown audiences an opportunity to view their work.

Artist Biographies:

Vanessa Brown is an artist who works in sculpture and installation. Her primary medium is steel and she is interested in challenging its historical associations with industry, war, and monument, by focusing its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, feminized labour, gestures of comfort, and ideas of escape.Vanessa Brown is based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle.

Helene Mackenzie is a writer and interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sound, video and text. She uses modular synthesizers, found sound, field recordings, digital processing, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic gesture, modes of perception, and acoustic imaginaries. This has culminated in site-specific sound installations, video, sound works, performances, and writing. Mackenzie holds a BA from Simon Fraser University, and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University, where she studied with Fredric Jameson, Anne Garréta, and others. While there, she researched questions around the violence and cultural amnesia that devours female genius, time and temporality, early twentieth century French literature and film, and the history of sound studies, sonic philosophy, and the sonic arts. Mackenzie’s works have been performed and exhibited in San Francisco at Kadist Gallery, in Brooklyn at The Hand, in Calgary at Esker Foundation and in Vancouver at Western Front, 221A, VIVO, Sunset Terrace, The Fishbowl and Polygon Gallery. Her work has also been released in conjunction with writing via The Operating System (Brooklyn), The Cultch's Soft Cedar and The Capilano Review's Small Caps (Vancouver).