Joani Tremblay at Zalucky Contemporary

Artist: Joani Tremblay

Exhibition title: Quaderno

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 13 – October 12, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary

One hour due north of Phoenix, Arizona Italian cypress trees begin to dot the skyline. Rising above the desert flats, their vertig- inous forms announce the presence of an outsider on this land. Indeed, they mark a gathering of buildings often described as otherworldly.

Arcosanti is a colony, but it is very much of this earth. Constructed in part from the surrounding desert soil, this vestige of 70s counterculture is architect Paolo Soleri’s utopian vision made-real. An experimental town that has outlived many others, the system of Arcology still reigns here. Unlike his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, who famously advocated for the automobile and sprawling lots, Soleri’s life work was an all-out assault on American car culture. A melding of ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology’, Arcology is based around the idea of the built environment as an evolutionary mechanism.1 More than a pedestrian paradise, Soleri envisioned a vertically-oriented city that would ultimately produce a higher level of human consciousness.

Built into the side of a desert canyon, the contemporary silhouette of Arcosanti is equally evocative of science fiction. Monumen- tal circles frame concrete block dwellings. Colourfully painted apses open up to the desert air. It is a passive-solar Rome, with a distinctly post-apocalyptic feel. Yet this is a real place, and work here soldiers on. Soleri is now gone, but young residents continue to lead tours and teach workshops in his trademark methodologies. Arcosanti’s well-known bells are forged according to the guild system, and sold across the country. The population is undoubtedly sparse, but the foundry and archive are abuzz with activity. It is still a master-apprentice world, but the patriarchy is slowly beginning to crumble.

– Rebecca Lemire, architectural historian

1 Larry Busbea, “Paolo Soleri and the Aesthetics of Irreversibility,” Journal of Architecture, Vol. 18, no. 6, 2013, p 781.

Joani Tremblay visited the architectural site of Arcosanti, Arizona, in the Fall of 2018, spending time at the site and doing research on foot in the surrounding area. The paintings in Quaderno, paralleled by Joani’s experience at Arcosanti, oscillate between the abstract and the representational, the virtual and the physical, and the utopian and the real. In her practice, Tremblay investigates the relationship between landscape, its simulations and reproductions, and how it is combined with our own memory of places.

It’s a salient topic in an age when nature is pictured in everything from films and photographs to theme park attractions, computer games and advertisements, from pages to screens to physical spaces and back again. This sense of multiple—and yet simultane- ously layered—experiences of landscape influences her process: she does all her drafting first on the computer, testing hundreds of possibilities in digital collage before sketching onto the material.

Joani Tremblay holds an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University (2017). Tremblay’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions notably in Los Angeles (Kantor LA), Stockholm (Pony Sugar), New York City (NADA NY), Tokyo (3331 Arts Chiyoda), Edmonton (Latitude 53), Toronto (Zalucky Contemporary) and in group exhibitions notably in New York (Asya Geisberg Gallery), Brooklyn (Interstate Projects), Los Angeles (00-LA), Romania (Bucharest Art Week), Denver (Dateline Gallery), Mexico City (Material Art Fair) and Montreal (Parisian Laundry). In 2017 and 2018, she was a finalist for the RBC Painting Competition. She has upcoming residencies in 2020 at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and The New York Art Residency and Studios Foun- dation (NARS) both in New York, as well as White Leaves Residency in New Mexico. She is the recipient of numerous grants, the most recent of which is The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2018).