Nadia Belerique at Daniel Faria Gallery

Artist: Nadia Belerique

Exhibition title: I Love You This Much

Venue: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 6 – July 20, 2024

Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present I Love You This Much, Nadia Belerique’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

As with much of Belerique’s work, this show is made up of real things and their representations, stand-ins, and surrogates, exploring the slippery lines between “acting,” “being,” and “becoming.” Domestic symbols such as houses and tables, mingle with those referencing the theatre and cinema. The language of the stage takes on multiple meanings. Actors pose for the camera hoping to be cast in a role, their collective desire to become someone else echoing throughout the room. Objects are cast in aluminum, allowing for a potentially endless multiplication, the “original” lost amidst its replicas. Objects are both stage props and physically used to prop up other objects.

A new series of photographs titled Central Casting are made from existing casting catalogues from 1988-1993, collected by Belerique over time. Images of aspiring actors’ headshots found throughout these catalogues are re-photographed on light tables, revealing both sides of each printed page, with two faces appearing simultaneously. Are they competitors, lovers, or a person and their shadow self? Sometimes smiling, other times serious, or an unsettling combination of the two, a new third figure uncannily swims to the surface. Despite their insisting fusion, the two faces flicker back and forth, becoming distinct as the viewer tries to separate them. This chorus of faces become both the main characters and an audience for the sculptures in the centre of the room.

In I Love You This Much, a series of tables are placed one inside the next, like nesting dolls. Some of them are missing their centres, as if split open and mirrored, recalling the doubled faces in the photographs. A self-portrait of sorts, the expanding, spreading and splitting allude to a personal expansion and refraction in Belerique’s own identity as a woman, artist, and mother. The construction and constraint of her own sense of personhood occurs in relation to the family members that came before her, and those that will follow. In creating this work, Belerique’s process was experimental, using objects found around the studio as place-holders to prop up the tables to a certain height: tuna cans, clay pipes, mason jars. In some cases, these place-holders remain in the finished sculpture, and in others they are sand casted and made into aluminum copies. One such item is a pastiche figurine standing on a tiny platform, next to a small tray for loose change, with the text “I Love You This Much” underneath. The figure’s arms are stretched above his head, spread wide. The spread of his arms echoes the spread of the tables, holding space in a way that suggests a gap to be filled.

The sculpture Coming Soon Forever features an empty marquee sign turned on its side, its flickering lights placing us in a scene or a set, while a house-shaped wall sculpture, titled House, acts as the backdrop for this domestic play. The house is a symbol of deep ambivalence for the artist, where the creation of “selfhood” occurs for good or for bad. In a reversal of façade and interior, House is made from wood veneer, a material usually reserved for furniture. Multiple types of wood and finishes create a series of stacked frames, growing smaller towards the centre, much like the nesting tables in I Love You This Much. The framed image— a photograph of the pond visible from Belerique’s studio—appears miniature compared to its container. A recurring subject in her work, the pond never fully fills up, it just rises and falls with the water table, a reflection of the season, rainfall, or drought, like an x-ray of what’s happening under our feet. The duck in the pond is a stand-in, a plastic duck decoy, staged to attract more ducks. Dug by a machine, and with a cord winding out of the image to pump air from a nearby windmill, the pond, too, is a staged scene.

The final component of the mis-en-scène, lights typically used in theatre, cinema, or commercial work, are suspended in the rafters of the gallery, shining down to imitate the late day sun through two windows. Like a film still or a photograph, these illusory windows freeze the exhibition in time. But they will be interrupted by the viewers’ shadows as they walk around, and shift in intensity based on the natural light coming in through the gallery’s open garage door, bringing the movement of the real world into the stillness of this fictional one.

Nadia Belerique (b. 1982) received her MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work was included in the Toronto Biennial of Art (2022), curated by Candice Hopkins, Tairone Bastien and Katie Lawson, and the New Museum Triennial (2021), curated by Margot Norton and Jamillah James. Recent solo exhibitions include: Slice at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2022); Body in Trouble at Fogo Island Arts, Newfoundland and Labrador (2022); There’s A Hole In The Bucket at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2019), On Sleep Stones at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2018), and The Weather Channel at Oakville Galleries (2018). Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Frac île-de-france, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2020); Lyles & King, New York (2019); Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2018); Vie d’ange, Montreal (2017); Tensta Konsthall, Spånga (2016); The Power Plant, Toronto (2015); and Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna (2014). Her work was included in La Biennale de Montreal (2016), curated by Philippe Pirote, and the Gwangju Biennale (2016), curated by Maria Lind. Belerique was long-listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award and has completed residencies at Walk & Talk (The Azores, Portugal) and Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island, Newfoundland), among others.