Lorna Bauer
Air is Where Effort Goes

November 19 to December 23, 2021

Galerie Nicolas Robert is proud to present Air is Where Effort Goes, an exhibition of new work by Lorna Bauer. Featuring 17 sculptures and one photograph, the exhibition furthers Bauer’s ongoing fascination with the formal and material qualities of glass. Surface, reflection and volume are at play here, asking viewers to navigate their bodies through a landscape of peculiar objects, each one unique in its organic, irregular form. These vessels are surrogates for the breath and body that made them. Nesting in metal receptacles that perform as container, shield, armature and method of display, these works fluctuate between nature and architecture, liquid and solid, metaphysics and matter. Further suggesting a physicality of the immaterial, Bauer has included a singular image of a spider in its web. Woven into place as a geometric overlay to its botanical surroundings, the web is created from materials inherent to its maker, delineating space as volume and embodying nature’s own polarities between strength and fragility, control and chance, grace and cruelty. Central to this body of work is a practice that hinges on the transference of energy, oscillating between interior and exterior and finding form in the formless.

Lorna Bauer utilizes photography and sculpture to examine human’s relationships to their surroundings. Bauer’s projects are characterized as site related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context, and speaks to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments.

Bauer lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal and her work has been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad: The National Gallery of Canada, The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, The Darling Foundry (Montreal), Franz Kaka (Toronto), Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, (Athens). She has been artist-in-residence at Despina (Rio de Janeiro), The Récollets (Paris), the Quebec-New York Residency, Banff Centre and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her works are present in public and private collections, notably the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In 2019 Bauer was awarded the Barbara Sphor Memorial Award and in 2021 she was a shortlisted finalist for the Sobey Art Award.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.