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CRUDE: SUBLIME SCULPTURAL LANDSCAPES BY SHELLY RAH<E

//////MARCH 5 - APRIL 16, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION:
MARCH 5th at 7pm

Rahme’s sculptural installations utilize materials from the built environment to reference the sublime in nature. Using the flatness of industrial materials such as glass, asphalt and drywall, Rahme creates works whose materiality contrasts with the organic forms that appear to be the result of geological forces. The resulting forms communicate a sense of drama and movement, albeit at a glacial or tectonic pace, that invokes the overwhelming experience of grandeur in nature referred to historically as the sublime. In recent years, our species’ fragile and reciprocal relationship with the natural world has played an increasingly wider role in collective awareness. Rahme’s work highlights the false dichotomy inherent to the antiquated distinction between the human and the natural.

Shelly Rahme received her undergraduate degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. After which she journeyed west to Alberta and British Columbia and worked as a welder-fabricator for five years. She then moved to the United States to pursue a Masters of Fine Art at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After graduate school, she tried living in Brooklyn for a year, then Toronto. She now lives in Northern Ontario where she keeps the pulse of nature. She also works with the special needs community and as a distributor and advocate for local food.

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CRUDE:
Sublime sculptural landscapes by Karla Griffin

A couple of years ago, while living in the interior of BC, I embarked on a Western Canada summer road trip, which was quickly halted by a “Work Crew Ahead” sign within the first 20 km of my journey on Highway 16. Stopped for what felt like an hour, but was more than likely only 15 minutes, I was met by a paving crew laying down row upon row of asphalt; but I could smell the distinctly overpowering odour long before I could see the caravan of pavers.

Like that mid summer day on highway 16, Shelly Rahme plays with the senses by using the very distinct smell of asphalt to attract, or completely repel, viewers who visit her exhibition, CRUDE: sublime sculptural landscapes, at aka gallery and artist-run centre.

Entering the gallery, besides the smell, viewers encounter four sculptural interpretations of industrialization: the urban sprawl of Manhattan, the Alberta oil sands, an oil tanker at sea and what appears to be a twisting highway ramp system. Navigating the gallery space, it becomes apparent that Rahme has deliberately used scale to her advantage: viewers experience the installations as aerial views, as if circling overhead and peering down from the windows of an airplane. Rahme’s use of perspective is derived from her belief that as a culture “we gain most of our visual knowledge of the built environment and the landscapes of the earth through photography, especially aerial photography.”

Rahme’s playful use of scale turns the massive into miniscule. Viewers are placed in a position of controlling, or being able to affect, environments that initially seem uncontrollable. For example, Open Pit transforms the Alberta oil sands into a small scale sandbox in which Rahme has hand moulded store bought building products to represent the very place that these products were extruded from. On this miniature scale, viewers are tempted to touch the installations, essentially leaving their mark on these barren landscapes, much like humanity has done to the actual landscapes that she depicts.

Here the connection to the Earth Art movement (also known as Land Art) of the 1960s and 1970s is undeniable. Rahme uses the white-walled gallery as a container and system of organization that lies in direct opposition to the borderless and unorganized natural materials that she changes, removes and re-forms. Rather than create large scale earthworks such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Rahme brings viewers to the forefront of constructed environments by re-constructing man altered landscapes, in order to draw attention to the discourse between rural and urban, natural and man-made, limited and limitless.

Sitting on the highway, the literal edge between nature and man-made, my vacation eventually continued, leaving the smell of asphalt far behind. But it is that particular smell that helps me consider perhaps Rahme’s use of sublime in her title, has more to do with our relationships to events that seem to have no impact on our individual lives, than to the awe inspiring aesthetic ideas of beauty that we as a culture place upon the landscapes that surround us.