Sobey Art Award Long List Show 2010
The sculptures included in the exhibition were: Shadows for Humans, 2003 and a series of the Shadows of Domestication, 2010.
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ON bought the floor-bound installation of the Shadows for Humans in 2013 for their permanent collection.
David Diviney, Curator of Exhibitions:
"Rooted in the formal and material language of sculpture, Vanessa Paschakarnis's work responds to and is of the world around us - plant, mineral, animal and human.
In a recent artist statement the artist writes: 'I am interested in the 'thing' as the conceptual other. By making objects - shadows, shields, bells beasts, horns and guardians - I am referring to phenomena and feeling that transpire in the world of the individual. My forms seem familiar, but they rest unknown.'
These thoughts are evident in Shadows for Humans (2003-2004). As with all of Paschakarnis' sculpture, the three large, carved marble elements that constitute this work are scaled in response to the human body. In turn, they collectively create a space that engages one's self through their physical nature and by drawing upon one's intuition in guiding your encounter with them. While stationary, as one circumnavigates the works they become animated by one's movements - they seem to unfold, fold over, etc. - and your experience of them. while the three elements are distinctly unique, they reference, or shadow if you will, one another in character, surface and form. This idea of shadowing, as per the title and in concept, is revisited in Shadows of Domestication (2010), a new series of pedestal based sculpture. Here, in worlds subtitled tomcat, horse, ladycat, the artist uses a new material, Winterstone, a multi-component cement-like sculpting medium, to pull molds from pre-existing carved stone works. In grouping and mirroring the resulting skin-like forms, Paschakarnis arrives at a series of hollow, vessel-like sculptures that, in effect, serve as a memory of those which cam before them."
(Images on this page by Raoul Manuel Schnell)
