Born in Toronto, lives and works in Montreal (Canada). She has recently presented her work at The Loon, Toronto; CK2 Gallery, New York; The Darling Foundry, Montreal; Model Projects, Vancouver; the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal among other places. Bauer has participated in numerous national and international residencies, including stays at The Couvent des Récollets, Paris; Quebec-New York Residency funded through the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec; The Banff Centre, Alberta and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida; working with the artist Josiah McElheny. She operates the artist project space L’escalier (together with Jon Knowles and Vincent Bonin) in Montréal.
Lorna Bauer works mainly in photography, installation and most recently, glass and bronze. Her formal language and use of materials alludes to ideas developed through city planning, and urban theory. Her work focuses on specific examples of architecture, urban planning and psycho-geography within the 20th Century. Her projects are generally characterized as site related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context. Interests are wide and range from topics such as the Paris city plan, in particular the arcades and the underground mushroom cultivation in the Parisian catacombs, Haussmannization, North American west coast utopian gardens from the nineteen sixties to Walter Benjamin’s letters to his lover, describing the Island of Ibiza, while in exile. All of her projects deal with spaces and how they shape individual perceptions and the correlation between the natural and the built environment.
In partnership with Despina, contemporary art center Diagonale (based in Montreal, Canada) and Le Conseil des arts de Montréal, have awarded Lorna Bauer with a full grant to participate in our residency programme. While in Rio during this month of November, Bauer is interested in researching and photographing the urban landscape of the city and how this landscape intersects and buts up against the lush natural environment – including its rainforests. In particular, she would like her research to focus on one of the most prominent landscape architects of Brazil, Roberto Burle-Marx and his contemporaries. Burle-Marx’s philosophy closely aligns with that of the Canadian modernists, Arthur Erickson and Cornelia Oberlander, who have both been the subjects of Bauer’s past work. All of these design visionaries used native plants and local natural materials, a continuity between built and natural spaces, a mindfulness of how one moves through space and an interest in reflection and reflective materials. In keeping with her past projects Bauer wishes to examine subjects related to urban development and urban renewal, and ultimately ask questions about what we choose to build or destroy in our local environment (both natural and artificial) and how this might reflect our ideology and collective subconscious.
More information
www.lornabauer.com
Pictures Gallery
(by Frederico Pellachin)
