Mary Pratt
Red Currant Jelly
Hi. I'm Sheila Heti, and I'm a novelist based in Toronto.
Mary Pratt's paintings make me value the space we call “home.” Her paintings of everyday objects like this one – of little Pyrex cups of red currant jelly on sheets of tin foil on a table – make me feel as though the world in the home is just as miraculous and beautiful and meaningful as the world outside the home – that world of other people, experiences, moving through society. The way the light glints in her painting makes it feel like the world is smiling at me, that it is asking me to come near, come closer, to sit with it awhile. I feel the painter's love for everything that is, for objects in general, because she chooses what might otherwise seem like such a funny subject matter, and chooses to honour it. And yet – what is funny about such a vivid red, pulsing in our midst? What is the blue that the tin foil is reflecting? What else is in the scene? Her blue dress? The sky through the window? Mary Pratt once said, “If I try to paint outdoors, I just sit there and cry… but if I'm in the house, I'm safe.” When she feels safe, she says, “all of these crazy things… happen.” “It,” she says, meaning the act of painting, “just happens.” The serious, subtle, mysterious craziness of red current jellies on tin foil “just happens,” and she feels safe and she paints them – and the sunlight streaming through them – and does not cry.
Marcelle Ferron
Sibilant Consonants
My name is Karoline Georges. In my literary and art practice, I explore the future of humanity and the desire for sublimation.
Sibilant Consonants. The title of Marcelle Ferron’s work sketches a sound image that slips between my lips. I hear whistling esses.
With this minimalist melody in mind, I gaze at the composition of the painting. A dynamic, elegant structure spreads from the centre of an expanse of light. I seek its echo in the work’s title. And suddenly, I’m propelled into the infinitely small, the depths of an atom, where physics foments its mysteries.
Within the brushstrokes, where bright colours melt together, substance slides into itself to create tension – a force field. It is here, within the clear edges of each textural relief, that I discover the frequency of the sound wave. Each shape reveals a hiss deployed simultaneously among a multitude of hisses. The symphony, imperceptible to the ear and yet manifest to the eye, tickles my imagination and moves bits of quantum physics in my neural recesses. Plunging into the microscopic dimension of matter to reach its tiniest component, we get to where elementary, vibrant particles overlap and combine with each other in ever more complex ways, like bouquets of energy, until they give body to the world. So, for just an instant, from my mouth, through the sibilant consonants, I hear the very breath of the universe.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
Countess Anna Ivanovna Tolstaya
Hello. I'm Katy Hessel, an author and art historian, based in London. You are looking at a painting by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, born in Paris in 1755, and one of the few women to break into the mainstream.
Known for her soft brushstrokes, which made her sitters appear slightly more attractive than they were, Vigée Le Brun was praised by wealthy patrons, including Queen Marie Antoinette. But at the onset of the French Revolution, she was forced to flee France, and travelled widely: across Europe, to England and Russia.
It’s during these travels that we meet her: in 1796 in St Petersburg, with Countess Anna Ivanovna Tolstaya, a Russian aristocrat. Here, the Countess is draped in a casual white dress with heavy gold chains – signalling her wealth. Overlaying her in an organic curve is a thick yellow cloth. This draws our eye from left to right – toward the silky waterfall – but also to the centre, where her long brown hair, tied up with fabric, frames her porcelain skin, and rosy lips.
Although meticulously prepared, this scene gives me the illusion that we’ve just walked into a casual setting. Everything is organically placed – as if mirroring the shiny glazes of water that pour from behind. But this was intentional: it was the end of the 18th century – the height of “Romanticism” – a movement which prized emotion over reason and rejected the urban for a more natural world. So, while the Countess’s beauty might be evident, Vigée Le Brun is also showing her intellectual awareness, giving prominence to the fact that women could be part of this culture too!
Georgia O’Keeffe
Lake George with Crows
Hello. My name is Kim Thúy. I am a Quebec author of Vietnamese origin.
I became aware of Georgia O’Keeffe thanks to the Gallery’s invitation to contribute to this audio tour. My heart was immediately touched by her painting Lake George with Crows, even though the first image I saw in the document sent was barely the size of a postage stamp. Right away, I was enticed by the softness of her colours and curves, and I quickly fell in love with the painter as well.
Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the pioneering painters who dared abstraction, dared to render nature as abstract. She takes us into details by magnifying, among other things, the bright colours of a flower, the precise lines of its petals, the nonchalant movement of the pistils. She paints the warmth, the wind, the scent, even as her forms portray the silent, the majestic, the solitary. She reveals to us that strength is sensual and that sensuality is powerful.
The historians say she was inspired by nature. I think she was one with nature. When she was living in New Mexico, she became fully integrated with her environment, the landscape that nurtured her until she was 98 years old. She liked to say that God told her if she painted the Pedernal mountain often enough, it would be hers.
Georgia O’Keeffe is one of those artists whom I can admire slowly, from a distance, for days, months, years. For time disappears in her vision of the world, a vision that carries and moves us again and again.
Agnes Martin
White Flower I
Hello. I am Sheila Heti, and I'm a novelist based in Toronto. I would like to tell you some of what I see and think about when I look at the Agnes Martin painting, White Flower I.
There are nine thick lines, and between each pair of thick lines, there are three thin lines. The thick lines run to the edge of the canvas, while the thin lines fall short, but their edges line up with each other perfectly. A flower is geometry, bloomed. But what if we did not experience objects in their three dimensions; what if we were creatures who experienced all matter in two? Is this how a white flower would look to us? The tracings of life – of veins – on the petals, or the thinner lines measuring the space between the petals, or the breeze that blows them around. The thin lines are our thoughts about the thick lines of the petals. They promise movement, swaying, dancing. The thick lines speak of the solidity of a petal’s forms. What would a petal translated into the binary code of zeros and ones look like? How would a computer speak about a white flower’s beauty? How about a white flower, calling to us in morse code? One thick line, followed by three thin lines, followed by one thick line, with the spaces suggesting pauses. This is sheet music of a white flower. But the sheet has no notes on it, for a white flower is beautifully silent. It does not speak, it does not sing, it has no song, but it suggests music anyway. This is a white flower after it has been picked, drained of all its green life, gradually dying.
Louise Bourgeois
Maman
Hello, I’m Esi Edugyan. I’m a literary novelist whose books have centred around historical Black experiences. Today I’m talking about Louise Bourgeois’ Maman.
The artist’s mother was a weaver, a restorer of antique tapestries, and Bourgeois’ early years found her in her parents’ workshop, helping to repair things worn and tattered by age. Picture it: a room lit here and there by candlelight, a single naked bulb above the loom, the child’s small head bowed over it as if in prayer, her hair thin and of such concentrated darkness it holds almost no glimmer. As her fingers tease the broken threads, a smell of old sweat and something eerily sweet wafts out. Each tapestry exhales the daily life of its household.
We are all, in a sense, the ongoing story of our childhoods. Weaving was the world of Bourgeois’ mother; the artist could neither embrace nor renounce the power of her mother's vocation. As a portrait, Maman speaks of an influence terrifying in its grandeur, casting its outsized shadow across everything. Under such a shadow, the observer is left stricken, rapt, held fast in horror, like a lost child. The spider weaves its delicate veil and captures a world; but the world itself must give way eventually; and, tattered, release us.
Isabelle Hayeur
Your Eyes
My name is Karoline Georges. I write futuristic novels and explore digital art. Right now, I’m looking at Isabelle Hayeur’s photograph Your Eyes.
Outdoors, nature, left to itself, swells with every possibility, but inside the building, which is no longer really a building, something persists in the shadows.
They are wide open: two eyes sketched out by a series of black lines on a wall that was once immaculate. One is half-erased, eaten away by a hole stretching into a tear shape, above an invisible mouth that I imagine is twisted with pain; the other one stares at something we can’t see. Together, they seem to have seen everything that has happened within the walls of this abandoned space. Intrusions, secrets, huddled and helpless bodies sleeping on the floor rather than giving up and leaving not only the protection of the defunct building but also this corner of the world, devoured by pollution, silence, dust, devastation.
I examine these eyes, drawn in the debris that they contemplate, and I feel anxiety rising, for in the depths of their gaze I discover the reflection of my own. When we look at our excessive constructions everywhere on Earth, our ruins, our multiplying errors that disfigure the planet more and more, we share, I sense, the same fear.
About
the speakers
Esi
Edugyan
Esi Edugyan is the author of the novels Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black, as well as the non-fiction books Dreaming of Elsewhere and Out of the Sun. Half-Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel, Washington Black, also won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Karoline
Georges
After studying film (UQAC) and art history (UQAM), Karoline Georges established an art practice that combines video, photography, literature and 3D modelling. She is the author of eight books, including Sous béton (finalist for the Prix des libraires du Québec 2012), the first Quebec title to be published in Gallimard’s prestigious Folio SF collection. Her most recent novel, De synthèse, garnered many honours, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2018. In 2021 she was named Artist of the Year in the Montérégie region by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Sheila
Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? Her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esme Shapiro, was published in May 2022. In late 2023, her book, The Alphabetical Diaries will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), FSG (USA) and Knopf Canada.
She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times; a list of 15 writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Heti’s books have been translated into 25 languages.
Kim
Thúy
Kim Thúy left Vietnam at age 10 with the wave of refugees known as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec. She holds degrees in translation and law, and has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant chef-owner. The author has received many awards, including the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award, and was among the four finalists for the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 29 languages and distributed across 40 countries and territories. She lives in Montreal and devotes herself to writing.
Katy
Hessel
Katy Hessel is an art historian, broadcaster, curator and the author of The Story of Art without Men, a New York Times and international Bestseller, and winner of Waterstones Book of the Year 2022. Dedicated to celebrating women artists from all over the world, she runs @thegreatwomenartists Instagram and The Great Women Artists Podcast, where she has interviewed the likes of Tracey Emin, Marina Abramoviċ and authors Ali Smith and Deborah Levy.