Valerie Knapp, Safety Lessons (egg in sheath detail)
On an unseasonably cold afternoon Sunday, May 9, Lafrenière & Pai Gallery was pulsing with warmth while celebrating its 10th anniversary with the opening of Eros from Chaos: The Contemporary Erotic.
The show brings together 18 artists working in various media, each of whom has adroitly straddled the fine line between the erotic and the chaotic.
“The exhibition celebrates who we are as a gallery of ten years,” said co-owner Megan Lafrenière, “presenting provocative works, in all media, by both established and upcoming artists. Above all, works that excite us.”
When considering the mix of love and chaos that's fundamental to maintaining an independent gallery in Ottawa, Lafrenière and partner Lisa Pai felt that show's the theme would be appropriate.
“People really shine incandescently when they experience work that snaps them to like an electric current is running through them,” said Pai. “It's hugely physiological and surely there's something erotic in that.”
Althought the show’s subtitle is The Contemporary Erotic, Lafrenière found it interesting that much of the work looks to the past for inspiration.
“Montreal artist Anna Jane McIntyre, for example, presents the odalisque of nineteenth-century European art as a beer-sipping white male hipster lounging before a black female gaze,” said Lafrenière. “And Ottawa's Mimi Cabri re-imagines prehistoric female statuary with her sensual ceramic deities.”
Offering a mix of delights that range from Annie Tung’s tiny sexbrooches with embroidered antique porn to Anna Williams’ bronze doe sporting a studded dog collar, Eros from Chaos includes something to whet virtually any erotic appetite.
Erin Robertson, Sticky Sweet
Erin Robertson, Undress
Mimi Cabri, Eros god of love and Eros from Chaos
Montreal’s Lalie Douglas’ three-dimensional piece titled There are two sides to this is based on a poem by the artist.
There are two sides to this
Take all they offer you
is only one
I also feel the stink and the farts
rise up, settle into my skin.
Nothing ever comes out
not one nor the other.
With the touch, will the lover
stir up the scent of the smell of the stink?
Dogs smell fear but who will it be
who’ll smell my pain, my sloth, my dirt?
Who’ll fill their skin with the fire
and the rankness of me?
