The Imperfecta Gallery proudly presents Absurdity Amused and Other Tall Tales, featuring Canadian artist Julie Liger-Belair, who creates collages to make sense of absurdity, taking fragments from different places and times and forcing them into new relationships and novel contexts to tell a different story. The artworks in this show exist somewhere between the playful and the disturbing, the beautiful and the grotesque, the ridiculous and the horrifying. They are a response to a world that increasingly feels like the stuff of folk tales and horror: a world in which the improbable has become ordinary, and reason often seems to have been replaced by spectacle and absurdity.
Liger-Belair has always been drawn to fairy and folk tales because they often help make sense of things that might otherwise be incomprehensible. They are strange, brutal, moralistic stories filled with monsters, impossible transformations, foolish kings, cruelty, and terrible things people do to one another — there is never anything particularly subtle about them, but beneath their absurdity is an attempt to give shape to fear, injustice, and the inexplicable.
“Lately, the distinction between those stories and real life has begun to feel increasingly unstable. I read the news and sometimes have the peculiar feeling that I have wandered into a particularly dark folk tale. The things people are saying and doing seem so grotesque and improbable that it can be difficult to believe they are actually part of our lived reality. At the same time, we seem determined to amuse and entertain ourselves to oblivion—perhaps it is simply human nature. Either way, there is something deeply absurd about it, and it makes these old stories feel increasingly relevant,” the artist explains.
The show debuts on October 1, with an Opening Reception from 5 to 8 p.m.