Erika Germain: A Hope To Wish For On A Star

“A vortex of movement and colour”

by

Step out of Edmonton’s grey downtown streets into Erika Germain’s show A Hope to Wish For on A Star – on at Latitude 53 until April 19 – and enter a world awash with colour. Cobalt blue, cadmium red, bright orange and cool purple twinkle from the walls, illuminating the space. Twisting and turning along the floor is a graceful wooden squiggle, lined with multicolored ceramic stars. 

Germain is an Edmonton-based artist with layered interests in community, ritual and language. In paintings such as The Names of People Who Are Loved: Samantha, Tyler, Joshua, Matthew, Racquel, John, Brad, Mona, Jocelyn, Henry, Ian, Patsy, Clark, Rob, Bretland and Lenie, Germain plays with words and colour. She creates her own coded language by assigning colours to the letters of the alphabet, then she paints these encoded sentences as looping lines of colour across her canvases. Often, the colours she paints correspond to the letters in the titles of her work, but Germain is most interested in translation as a process. The paintings are not meant to be deciphered, but rather experienced. 

“That process of moving meaning from one space to another, I find it almost like a spiritual thing,” says Germain. 

Look closely at paintings like, I Am Whole Like an Orange, and you can see that the surface is made up of tiny blue and white brushstrokes moving together like waves. The blue is punctuated by yellow and red marks, flashing like lights beneath the surf. The short, meditative marks contribute to the ritual, spiritual nature of the work. Small ceramic elements are tied to the canvas, like flotsam bobbing on the sea, and the edges are ringed with scalloped blue ceramic tiles. All of these whirling shapes contribute to a vortex of movement and colour. 

The work in this show combines painting and sculpture in unique ways. Many of the paintings have ceramic tiles mounted on their edges, providing colourful frames that add to their visual impact on the wall. Small ceramic shapes, circles, stars and amorphous, blob-like pieces are affixed to the paintings, floating on their surfaces.  And The World Continues on Pointed Toes is a huge star-shaped canvas that stretches across the wall and plays with the boundaries between sculpture and painting.  

Germain’s central, snaking installation, Ritual altar, is a participatory invitation. Visitors are prompted to leave a written offering, asked to write down “a love to give away, a hate to leave behind, a fear to face together, a hope to wish for on a star.” In exchange, they can take one of the small, four-pointed ceramic stars that Germain created for the exhibition. The offerings left behind inform Germain’s next work, sometimes becoming the titles of new pieces, part of a generative cycle of making. And the objects that people take away go on to have a life of their own.

“There’s this strange little community of people who don’t know each other and will never meet each other, but they have these objects that are all connected,” says Germain.

“There’s something, to me, quite magical about it.” ■

Erika Germain: A Hope to Wish For on A Star, on at Latitude 53 in Edmonton from Mar 7 to April 19, 2025.

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Latitude 53

10130 100 Street NW, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 0N8

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