Elaine Stocki

Opening Thursday April 18, 2019 from 6 to 8:30pm (last entrance 8pm)
Guided tour with the artist at 5pm, by reservation

The Canadian Cultural Center is proud to showcase, for the first time in Europe, both the latest photographs and watercolors by Canadian artist Elaine Stocki and present them as part of a major solo exhibition.

In this exhibition, the artist encourages us to face our preconceptions by using the contrast of shadow and light, and that of colors, to rethink our notions of diversity. Be they ethnic, social, physical, aesthetic, cultural, sexual, generational, all of humanity’s differences are—for once—happily integrated. These works challenge us: how do we react when we are confronted with individuals who are so close, yet so distant?

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Elaine Stocki currently resides in Los Angeles. Her work has been nominated for the Grange Prize and the Sobey Award.

The work of Canadian artist Elaine Stocki creates an interplay between distance and proximity. Systematically transgressing the “right” distance, playing on empathy, immodesty, intimacy, desire, the natural, the obscene, the overexposed, the repulsive, Elaine Stocki’s photographs disrupt our perceptions and interpretations, and make us reconsiderour judgments, our distance, our defence mechanisms against others, especially when they are different from us.

How do we react, confronted with the exhibition of individuals who are both near and far, to this subtle expression of diversity based on contact that exposes people to one another, in which everyone develops their identity precisely because of their relationship to the other? How do we react, we, the individual viewer, to the exhibition of a provocative diversity that risks making us forget that an individual is not representative of any category, and that difference is not absolute but always relative—relative to what is presented beside it or which surrounds it, relative to the person looking at it. Those questions are at the heart of Elaine Stocki’s practice. A practice that plays on contrast (that of the colours, shades, values, clarity and obscurity) and contact, with the expression of a sensibility anchored in touch.

Elaine Stocki’s inspiration and subjects are undeniably anchored in North American culture, but the artist’s practice and sense of abstraction move beyond this framework and touch on universal questions. Transported to Europe, confronted with the extremely diversified cultures that circulate in the artistic institutions of Paris, the works, in their manner, might raise a conscience, as they oppose their humanism to the often sly forms that rejection, indifference and xenophobia can take.

Elaine Stocki’s work is held in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has exhibited at Thomas Erben Gallery, Zach Feuer Gallery and Capricious Space in New York, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Canada, she has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge) and Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Calgary). Stocki’s work has been nominated for the Grange Prize (now the AIMIA Photography Prize), the Sobey Award, and she has been the recipient of grants and awards including the Tierney Fellowship, The Philadelphia Museum of Art Portfolio Competition and numerous Canada Council of the Arts Project Grant. Her works has been published in Border Crossings, Night Papers, MATTE, TIME (LightBox), Semiotext(e), BlackFlash, TBW Books and The New Yorker. Elaine Stocki has been a visiting artist and critic at the universities of Princeton and Yale, Bard College of the Arts, Parsons (The New School) and Otis College of Art and Design.

A 112 page catalogue, bilingual and richly illustrated, accompanies the exhibition. It is co-published by Skira and the Canadian Cultural Centre. It contains an essay by the curator and a discussion with the artist. 

Further information: www.canada-culture.org