Cloud Quarry

Amy Brener | Michael Doerksen

August 30 to September 28, 2013

Cloud Quarry is a two-person exhibition that introduces a conversation between the recent works of Amy Brener and Michael Doerksen. Builders of sculptural worlds happily operating on both micro and macroscopic levels, Brener and Doerksen create objects that support (and contain) dichotomies of the material and the intangible—control and chance.

Brener’s crystalline sculptures explore an interest in temporal elasticity and strive to point forward and backwards at once. They arise from intense labour and a singular method of preparing frameworks which she fills with many layers of pigmented resin embedded with reflective materials and bits of technology rapidly passing into obsolescence. The finished works shapeshift with our perception of them, reorienting and playing with light and scale, becoming fluid at the same moment we fully experience their rigidity.

Doerksen’s multi-coloured planetoid volumes aim to capture the chance operations of skylight and cloud formation in both process and appearance. Once these works are de-molded, Doerksen begins to sand them down as though he is traveling backwards along the path of their making, revealing complex chromatic surface patterns in the thinly layered gypsum. These planet orbs unsettle as much as they compel, dismantling our sense of scale and context in the world: we are dwarfed or gigantic, alien or familiar, relative to what?

Inherent in this process-based work of Brener and Doerksen are the risks and opportunities that come with scaling and circumnavigating anything beyond our knowing. There is an attempt to capture something that is uncontainable, as impossible as the excavation of clouds.

Amy Brener was born in Victoria, BC and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College in 2010 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. She was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2012. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Toronto and London. Recent shows include The In Between at Greene Exhibitions (Los Angeles), Saturation Point at Dutton (New York) and More and Different Flags at Marlborough Chelsea (New York). Brener’s work will be exhibited this fall at Aanant & Zoo (Berlin) and Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York). She has been featured in publications such as Under the Influence, Whitehot Magazine, Artinfo and Modern Painters.

Michael Doerksen is a visual artist and musician born on Vancouver Island, raised in Langford and currently living in Victoria. He first attended art school at Camosun College (1999) and later obtained a BFA (2005) and an MFA in Sculpture (2012) from Concordia University in Montreal. Doerksen’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, both independently and as a member of the now inactive video/performance based art collective The Discriminating Gentlemen’s Club. Notable exhibitions include (Re)thinking Sculpture at Galerie Lilian Rodriguez (Montreal, 2013), Making It Work at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal, 2009), PULP at Open Space in (Victoria, 2007), ctrl_alt_del sound-art festival at the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007) and the Commonwealth-based Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia (2006). As a musician he was a member of the critically acclaimed art rock band Sunset Rubdown who released four LPs, two EPs, and toured internationally before disbanding in 2009. Doerksen maintains representation at Galerie Lilian Rodriguez in Montreal where his work has entered into private collections.