AXENÉO7
Gatineau
December 17, 2014—
February 7, 2015

Presenting an exhibition of new site-specific work at AXENÉO7 titled Something that accompanies one everyday and everywhere, Montreal artist Nicolas Fleming combines unusual display tactics to re-image the conventional white cube gallery space as a contingent, transitory site for experimentation. With this exhibition, Fleming’s work traces a simultaneous additive and reductive play with the gallery walls that asks what it means for a particular site to be “under construction.” Overall, Fleming’s interest in an interventionist mode of minimalist sculpture allows us to rethink the relationship between backgrounds and foregrounds as our familiarity with the gallery space becomes increasingly blurred and confused.

Central to Fleming’s practice is an interest in breaking apart the conventional hierarchy of background, support and object. This exhibition consists of separate, yet partially connected installations that the artist constructed on-site. In both spaces, materials, objects and forms are tactfully stripped, broken down and reconstructed, thus focusing on the intuitive and manual aspect of building present in Fleming’s artistic process. First, it is critical to note that this gallery intervention occurs marginally, through imprecise, makeshift structures, primarily staged through the use synthetic adhesive substances, plywood, and fluorescent light fixtures. Throughout the exhibition, conventional aesthetic “imperfections” are celebrated rather than hidden. Signalled by his heavy, unapologetic use of caulking glue and his deliberate decision to leave nails, wires, and knots exposed to the viewer, these installations appear to us as if they were

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