PRESENTATION: Nadia Belerique-Body in Trouble
Nadia Belerique, working in photography, sculpture, and installation, expands on photographic strategies of framing, aperture, depth, and the distance between objects and their representations. Her works commonly address tenuous relationships between insides and outsides, private and public, exposed and contained. Collaging and piecing together found objects, photographs, and stained glass, she layers their intrinsic histories and functions to transform them into something else entirely.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fogo Island Arts Archive
Viewing Nadia Belerique’s work is like walking through a photograph. The Toronto-based artist creates contemporary installations with a photographic eye, building scenes with mixed materials. “I think about photographs in three-dimensional space,” she explains. “I like the idea of my work feeling like collage. Architecture is a huge aspect of the work too … and the way objects and space relate to each other and to the viewer. There’s something very experiential about the work”. Following a residency at Fogo Island Arts seven years ago, Nadia Belerique was invited to present a solo exhibition of her work in 2022. “Body in Trouble” is a new series of works by Belerique that are directly linked to her time on Fogo Island, where she began to experiment with integrating sculptural and architectural gestures into a practice that was predominantly photographic at the time. Nadia Belerique was born in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1980s, growing up around the time when Canadian singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara’s song “Body’s in Trouble” (1988) was released. The song is an important starting point for Belerique’s new work, which, like this track, is concerned with the experience of the physical form and its discontents. “Body’s in Trouble” has been praised for straddling a tension between tradition and formlessness, a characteristic that Belerique’s work also shares. In her work, everyday materials and art historical tropes are networked in ways that develop meaning but also remain open-ended, encouraging the viewer to follow visual clues but also bring their own meaning to bear on the work, all the while fitting into a carefully constructed set of relations. Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, Belerique’s new body of work draws on both sincerity and satire to construct an installation to be entered that is simultaneously an image to be experienced. Working like a film director or set designer, Belerique carefully considers how objects are placed in space to create a scenario that is a scene to be experienced but also offers up a metaphorical scene for the imagination—as a means of questioning how images are mediated, while also considering how meaning is ascribed to objects.
Photo: Nadia Belerique, If I Had Words, 2022, © Nadia Belerique, Courtesy the artist and Fogo Island Arts
Info: Curators: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Claire Shea, Fogo Island Arts, 210 Main Street, Joe Batt’s Arm, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, Duration: 29/7-25/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu 12:00-17:00, www.fogoislandarts.ca/
