Kelly Jazvac
The Accumulating Years

September 10 to October 15, 2022

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Kelly Jazvac’s first solo exhibition in Montréal, The Accumulating Years, a word twist on a phrase in financial planning that refers to a desired life-stage when a client’s assets are increasing and debt is decreasing. Here, Jazvac inflects a larger sense of consequence and time as a prompt for thinking through her environmentally-oriented artworks. This new suite of work features floor and wall sculptures made from recuperated vinyl billboards that sell things from shoes to purses to women’s bodies. Jazvac has juxtaposed these images with recuperated ash wood and plastic debris sourced from Montréal. In each work, there is a sense of transformation and material history, but also of the subject looking back.

Kelly Jazvac is a Canadian artist based in Montréal, Canada. She is also part of a plastic pollution research team called The Synthetic Collective, which includes scientists, artists, art historians, philosophers, and writers. The work of this research group is highly influential on Jazvac’s artistic practice. She has recently exhibited at The Musée D’Art Contemporain (Montréal), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Eli and Edyth Broad Museum (East Lansing), Ujazdowski Castle CCA (Warsaw), and FIERMAN Gallery (New York). Her work has been written about in National Geographic, e-flux Journal, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, The New Yorker, Canadian Art Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her co-authored, collaborative art/science research has been published in scientific journals including Nature Reviews, GSA Today, and Science of the Total Environment.

The artist would like to thank Théo Bignon, Allison Higgins, Elizabeth Xu, Chris Latchem, Andrew Hoekstra, and Renée Forest.