Emily Hermant’s recent installations focus on revealing hidden patterns and meanings in communication.  In her exhibition at articule, the artist constructs an immersive, mixed-media environment based on digitally manipulated pauses, hesitations and other communicative glitches that have been extracted from intimate conversations.  These pauses, stumbles and gaps are reflective of myriad psychological states, and they provide temporary (and often overlooked) glimpses of human foible, vulnerability, doubt, affection, anger, strength and domination.  Using thread and nails as her primary materials, Hermant transforms, rearranges and recontextualizes these glitches into large-scale, tactile maps of intimacy and power.  Her playful and dramatic installation, which consists principally of juxtaposed, large-scale waveforms, unveils and resituates hidden artifacts in the recordings, as well as the intentions and perceptions of the speakers.  Taken together, the materials and relational elements of Hermant's piece convey the complexity, absurdity and simultaneous possibility and impossibility of intimate communication.

 

Born in Toronto in 1980, Emily Hermant is an installation artist whose work explores the ways in which seemingly ordinary interactions, experiences, and spaces can be transformed to address themes of intimacy, attachment, isolation, deception, desire, communication, memory, and history.  Her installations touch on these transformations using a wide range of materials, including fiber, wood, plastic, and digital media. Hermant’s work has been shown in museums, galleries, and festivals in Canada, the United States, South America, and Europe, most recently at the Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, IL (2009, 2010), the Triennale di Milano Design Museum in Milan, Italy (2009), the Biennale Internationale du Lin in Portneuf, Québec (2009), and at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York (2007-2008).  She received her BFA in Studio Arts and Religion from Concordia University, Montréal, in 2004.  Most recently, she completed her MFA as Trustee Merit Scholar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, where her work was partially supported by a grant from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC).

Exhibitions  

Participating Artists: Emily Hermant (Montréal/Chicago)
Curator(s):
Credits: Sound design : Ryan T. Dunn — www.liscentric.com Voices : Tara Hills, Joseph Kramer, Ben Klaff, Natacha Stolz, Jenny Vallier, Ryan T Dunn