|
|
A Place for Rose (detail), 2000-2001
In collaboration with Julien Sorge Geoffroy and Gloria Sorge
Mural work with sound:
intaglio, silkscreen printing on Arches vellum, frame of California redwood,
audio component (recorded narration)
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
" What is it like to be born of a place, to stay and live there,
to know that you are of it (Edward Said) ... and of another place, a
fantasy place, born of a mother's memory?"
"We were compensated in our most
difficult times by our mother's stories that transported us to Syria, to
her childhood. Her village near Damascus became an ideal place in my mind. [...]
This dichotomy of the two villages, mine and hers, reality a
nd myth, provided an in-between world for me, a world which consisted of
both places. My imagination was stimulated by a desire to make everything
one, to find wholeness, to solve the mystery of difference. How can these
two worlds meet, what is the same about them? My quest became existential."
"The large wooden frame that surrounds the prints was created by one of my
Syrian mother's grandsons [...]. This view, within a frame, gives perspective
and distance and brings us back to the here and now [...]. "
Excerpts from the artist's statement and from a text by the artist
Born in 1943 in Truro, Nova Scotia, to parents of Syrian origin, Bernice Lutfie
Sorge lived in British Columbia and in several Latin American countries before settling
in Quebec. Being the daughter of an immigrant mother, I have never really known what
"home" means. She has lived in Quebec's Eastern Townships for more than 20 years now.
![Bernice Lutfie Sorge](/web/20061029120425im_/http://www.civilization.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_13p3.gif)
Bernice Lutfie Sorge,
Dunham, Quebec, 2000
Rawi Hage
Gelatine silver prints
Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization
This painter and engraver, who describes herself as an "explorer," began her career
with landscape painting, only to progressively distance herself from it and involve herself
in a more conceptual and experimental process. After earning a Bachelor's degree in visual
arts from Montreal's Concordia University, she moved to the country to work directly from nature.
A Place for Rose, 2000-2001
In collaboration with Julien Sorge Geoffroy and Gloria Sorge
Mural work with sound:
intaglio, silkscreen printing on Arches vellum, frame of California redwood,
audio component (recorded narration)
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
I gather things from the woods . . . I have always had the desire to create something
from nothing. This desire was inspired by her mother, a figure who occupied and still
occupies a central place in a process in which the question of identity has always been
present. Art has been a marvellous thing for me. It is through art that I have explored
my roots, my origins. I have plunged deeper and deeper into the very matter of art, by using
materials that come directly from the earth, from the woods.
For Bernice Lutfie Sorge, questions are more important than answers, and it is those
questions that she tries to formulate in her installations, her canvases and her engravings,
questions that should reach out to everyone: I love to transform things, and even to
transmute them; to make them, in a sense, accessible to everyone. When I do something, I
always want to bring it to some sort of universal conclusion . . . although, as far as I
am concerned, nothing is ever quite finished.
Founder of the Centre d'art Missisquoi in Dunham and L'Estampille printmaking studio,
she is a member of the Conseil québécois de l'estampe and of the Conseil de la
peinture du Québec. She has to her credit numerous exhibitions in Canada and in France,
and her works are found in many public and private collections.
http://bernicesorge.ca
bernicesorge@yahoo.com
|