Artists: Jessica Williams in collaboration with Katerine Dennie-Marcoux
Exhibition title: Tunnel of Love
Venue: Projet Pangée, Montreal, Canada
Date: March 18 – online, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Projet Pangée, Montreal
Montreal, March 18, 2021 — Projet Pangée is thrilled to present its new virtual exhibition titled Tunnel of Love, a solo show by Jessica Williams (Los Angeles, USA), on view within a virtual space designed in collaboration with Katerine Dennie-Marcoux (Montreal, Canada). Inspired by the Tunnel of Love, originally called “river caves”, these amusement park rides gave lovers a place to spend time together, isolated from the world. Popularized in the 1950’s and 1960’s, they eventually disappeared from the physical world, existing primarily in the collective consciousness. The exhibition design allows visitors to enter the environment on a swan boat, where they can navigate at their own pace to view the paintings exhibited within. The tunnel itself is a loop, with windows that reveal a landscape on fire, simulating the experience of time stretching out indefinitely, and the pervasive unease of an ongoing plague.
This past year in the pandemic, multiple rounds of confinement exaggerated the distance between our intimate selves and reality, effectively replaced by a world of screens. In her recent paintings, Williams continues to explore the Los Angeles cityscape as a stage for painting, channeling the gothic, mournful atmosphere of the last year. She paints her first-hand experiences and memories of places she missed, as well as her vivid, haunted dreams, in which a repeated motif is an isolated swan drifting on a dark lake. Influenced by El Greco’s dramatic landscapes and the melancholic portraiture of Paula Modersohn-Becker, she imagines an expansive nocturnal world focusing on people and places from her life. The paintings are intuitively constructed, layering oil paint to reveal and conceal, suggesting multiple narratives. Tunnel of Love invites the viewer to wander in the darkness and to experience Williams’ paintings within this mysterious, augmented new reality.
Jessica William (Los Angeles, USA) holds a MFA from Columbia University (2008) and an BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2005). Her work has been included in recent shows at HVW8, Los Angeles; Insect, Los Angeles; SADE, Los Angeles; Galeria La Esperanza, Mexico City; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; and Young Art, Los Angeles. She is currently a lecturer in the painting department at the UCLA School of Art.
Katerine Dennie-Marcoux (Montreal, Canada) uses her expertise in graphic design and digital art to create virtual images and environments. This project marks her third collaboration with Projet Pangée.
