April 29 – May 27, 2017
Opening Saturday April 29th from 3 pm to 6 pm
Artist in attendance
The stillness of inanimate matter and the silence of motionless surfaces are not the true condition of objects. Stasis, in fact, is not an attribute of the things we hurry past in our daily lives but rather an inherent artifact of the human timeframe.
The objects in Omen are ensnared by the threshold of stillness and motion. They have just moved or are just about to. Each work carries a burden of potential inherited from its material lineage of forest, or ore, and from human interventions of intent, worry and hope. This burden is delivered to the viewer not in physical weight or material worth, but through the silent charge that propels any purpose to its fulfilment; through the taut spring of expectation that is left to uncoil within the viewer’s skull.
– ML
Maskull Lasserre (born 1978) spent his formative years in South Africa before returning to Canada. He has a BFA in Visual Art and Philosophy from Mount Allison University, and an MFA in Studio Art from Concordia University.
Maskull’s work has been exhibited at Banksy’s Dismaland, and at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. He has held visiting artist positions at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, at Kohler Art/Industry and with the Canadian Armed Forces. His work appears on Canadian coinage and is represented in collections in Canada, the US, and Europe including those of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Canadian War Museum. He has taught sessionally at Concordia, York, and Emily Carr Universities, as well as at the California College of Art.
Maskull’s drawings and sculptures explore the unexpected potential of the everyday by inducing strangeness in the familiar, and provoking uncertainty in the expected. Each work is developed as a model to mediate the translation of experience between matter and mind.
Omen
2015
4000lb cast iron birds
variable dimensions
HD video documentation
(Courtesy John Michael Kohler Art Centre)
Elsa
2017
shoe forms, steel trap
30 x 30 x 32 cm. (12” x 12” x 13”)
Image at top: Omen, 2015, 4000lb cast iron birds, variable dimensions, HD video documentation (Courtesy John Michael Kohler Art Centre)