Eleanor bond: mountain of shame

An exhibition catalogue by Plug In ICA in collaboration with the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, Alberta. Featuring over 30 pages of full colour plates, an in-depth interview with the artist, and essays by beloved Winnipeg-born, Berlin-based author Rodney LaTourelle and Montreal-based art historian Johanne Sloan, this compilation marks the inaugural exhibition at our current location. 

Curated by Helga Pakassar in 2010, the exhibition Mountain of Shame signifies both a new direction for Plug In ICA as an institution and a distinct shift in the work of Winnipeg born artist Eleanor Bond. Breaking from the urban and architectural spaces for which she is well-known Bond turns to the subjective and expands to include three-dimensional painted objects. Utopian spaces stand in relation to abstractly figurative paintings and enigmatic sculptural forms. Together the works produce a dynamic orientation that relentlessly pushes at the boundaries of material experimentation and radical site-specificity. Bond’s exhibition and catalogue Mountain of Shame looks to the immediate setting of Plug In ICA’s new cohabitation with the University of Winnipeg – and extends outward to incorporate larger local and global contexts while simultaneously centering on the personal, psychosocial experience. The works come together in Mountain of Shame as a unified body while simultaneously producing a series of distinct objects that cross language and materiality. 

Designed by Zab Design & Typography and edited by Wayne Baerwaldt who interviews Bond in “What If The Soul Has No Culture”, drawing out her references and influences, Eleanor Bond: Mountain of Shame expands the life of this generative exhibition as an exquisitely designed and thoughtfully constructed monograph that pays just dues to its contribution to the field of expanded painting and a breadth of intellectual and art historical references. Other texts include “Clouds and Things” by Johanne Sloan and “Bad Objects” by Rodney LaTourelle. As Bond concludes her tenure in Montreal and returns to her hometown of Winnipeg this book creates a timely and intimate portrait of the artist that links Mountain of Shame to an impressive range of contemporary concerns and critical reflections as disparate as object oriented ontology (Sloan) and social movements such as the Black Bloc and Occupy (La Tourelle).

This publication holds immeasurable import for us as an institution and extends to the greater Canadian and International art milieu of which Bond has been an active and formative member for over three decades. In addition to the provocative and rigorous texts Eleanor Bond: Mountain of Shame includes sixty-four colour and black and white images giving readers a complete picture of her works as autonomous subjects, their place in relation to Bond’s practice as a whole, and as they were installed during their exhibition at Plug In ICA in 2010, and at the Illingworth Kerr gallery in 2011.

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