Lyse Lemieux: No Fixed Abode
Lyse Lemieux, No Fixed Abode. Installation view at SFU Gallery, 2020. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
SFU Gallery
Lyse Lemieux's artistic practice engages the line through forms that range from figuration to abstraction, and that extend into installation and sculpture. No Fixed Abode is an exhibition of drawings, both three-dimensional textile drawings and large drawings on paper, through which Lemieux uses the line in a nonlinear way, where sources are humorously uncertain, references ambiguous, and yet they assume a physical assuredness.
Lemieux's exhibition title refers to the elusive subject of Franz Kafka's short story Odradek, or The Cares of a Family Man (1919). The story is about a figure or thing called Odradek that is somewhere between subject and object. "He lurks by turn in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. …Yet when asked, 'And where do you live?' 'No fixed abode,' he says, and laughs, but it is only the kind the mind of laughter that has no lungs behind it." Pursuing forms that inhabit a space of ambiguity, Lemieux’s works resist being easily read, particularly in her blurring of subject and object.
