Camille Jodoin-Eng: ‘Earth Shrine’
Exhibition Dates: Jan. 9 - Feb. 23 2020
Location: Patel Gallery, 1151 Queen St E
Earth Shrine, a fully immersive experiential installation work by Toronto based artist Camille Jodoin-Eng will be opening at Patel Gallery January 9th 2020. Lifting off from prominent themes in previous works of repetition and symbology, Earth Shrine is one of the largest installations Jodoin-Eng has created to date. Designed as a kind of psycho-spiritual portal, akin to a temple or garden, Earth Shrine asks participants to quietly pause within the installation, drawing focus toward the central sculpture of an ascending staircase at the base of a shrine. What can we individually aspire to be? Metaphorically? Physically? The mirror and it’s reflections become plodded earth to sew our potentiality anew. Comprised of mostly forraged materials that have come into contact with the artists every day life; plastics, rubble, wire, newspaper and acrylics are gilded in silver, gold and copper reflecting back to the participants a duplicate world of possibility. In spite of themselves, visitors within the space participate in the ongoing creation of the installation. Within the portable temple all icons and deities are removed. We the visitor are met with the present, our past and a shrine comprised of mostly trash.
Alongside Earth Shrine, the exhibition features a recent sculptural installation entitled Water Shrine (2019). The future probabilities presented by the ideas behind Water Shrine make use of the circumstance of the two way mirror—the viewer can stand near and still not bear witness to themselves inside the piece. Water Shrine presents a fictionalized abstraction of the technology people will have to recreate on their own in the future; do it yourself water filtration systems built out of found objects. Just an hour North of Six Nations, and a few hours North of Flint, Michigan, this fictionalized narrative is not too far off from the reality of the present moment. And yet with reality and speculative fiction, our mindspace is often held back with dissonance. At a distance close and not yet close enough to really center ourselves inside the narrative, Jodoin-Eng’s dystopic Brita filter and subsequent world ask the viewer to consider our points of entry into relatability. With the idea of language as the first VR mechanism, we can consider the symbols of the written word. Through these symbols we pass along stories; stories that educate, stories that speculate potential and stories that enact a means of access. If language is a form of virtual reality, once meaning is assigned it can no longer be unseen, like drawing lines from dot to dot on a puzzle
Text by Dusty Lee Norsworthy
This exhibition is made possible by the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
