About —
Jennifer Angus is a Canadian artist celebrated for her installations, in which visitors discover arrangements of insects pinned to the walls. Her artistic approach is a fascinating fusion of visual art and decorative art that forces us to reconsider our cultural perceptions of shapes and patterns. Using a trompe-l’oeil technique, her installations, like tapestries, display ornamental compositions created with insects. The arrangements of insect specimens form patterns that are enchanting at first glance but can seem repulsive once one has identified what the components are. Angus’s works play on this paradoxical reaction of most people to insects and then change that initial perception. Recently the artist has been designing and printing wallpapers that she pastes on to the walls of her installations, to serve as an illustrated background to the insects she then pins up. These serigraphs enable her to explore a new approach to textiles that graphically underlines the subtext of her œuvre.
The project A Terrible Beauty was conceived in three chapters so that each one could be exhibited in a different space: the first chapter appeared at the Textile Museum of Canada, the second at the Dennos Museum Center and the third will be shown at the Musée d’art de Joliette. Unusual in that they are inspired by each exhibition space, all the chapters recall cabinets of curiosities and are informed by the nineteenth century Victorian Age.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue co-produced by the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Textile Museum of Canada and the Dennos Museum Center. Eve-Lyne Beaudry, Assistant Curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette, is the exhibition curator.
