(More photos below)
Let’s sit and talk.
You’ve just read that sentence on either a flat page of newsprint or a digital screen. Imagine taking each letter in those four words and turning it into a three-dimensional sculpture that is not only a beautiful piece of art but also works as a bench where you can sit and, yes, talk. Now think of those words in context of what they mean – an invitation, human interaction, connection.
But to fully grasp the complexity of the Let’s Sit and Talk exhibit at Equinox Gallery, you also need to know a little more about the artist who transformed these four words, in Arabic, into a hugely compelling, aesthetically graceful, eminently functional sculpture installation.
Marie Khouri was born in Egypt, grew up in Lebanon, fled to Canada at the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war (during which her father was assassinated), moved to Paris, married, had three children and then settled, as a family, in Vancouver eight years ago. The simplicity of that sentence belies the ocean of experiences contained in the life of anyone whose story begins “I grew up in Lebanon…”.
“The Middle East is a place where there’s a permanent conflict,” Khouri says a couple of weeks before the exhibit’s June 7 opening. “Lebanon, since the beginning of time, is a war zone. I wanted to embrace this part of the Middle East but do it on my own terms, in a beautiful way.”
She wants to take that history of destruction and bloodshed and, through the simple act of being invited to sit down and talk, reconstruct and rebuild relationships.
Khouri’s professional background is in business and finance. She speaks five languages but says it’s only when she started to sculpt, at the age of 36, that she found her true voice.
“When I touched clay I was able to say things in another way. It just has a depth… It’s more internal, like a therapy. It was opening gates that I’d closed in life. Sculpting is if I couldn’t lie to myself any more.”
Those gates were a protection, a way of shutting out some of the more painful parts of the past.
And yet in that life there has also been beauty, love, understanding and hard-earned wisdom. She needs her sculptures to convey that, too, and she was drawn to the concept of art not simply as something we simply observe but something that plays a tangible role in our lives — a vessel, a chair, a ring.
Her work has earned many accolades, including 2012 Designer of the Year in both furniture and jewelry from Western Living magazine. Her public sculpture includes a bench outside the Olympic Village Skytrain stop.
She designed the individual pieces of the sculpture first as maquettes small enough to gently cup in the palm of her hand. In each sculpture’s shape you can follow the curvature of her palm and fingers and feel the imprint of a thumb.
Each letter had to remain true to itself so that, when seen from above, you can “read” the sculpture. But she didn’t simply want to create a letter, lay it on its back and use it as a bench. Her letters have no flat surfaces and their undulating, shape-shifting surfaces evoke comparisons with Henry Moore.
Our alphabet can have a lot of hard lines: A, F, T, Z. The letters are a means to an end: functional, practical, to the point. Arabic lettering has a rhythm and flow, with intricate designs based on whether the letter is at the beginning or end of the word.
“Middle East artists and architects have this ability to work with curves and I wonder if it doesn’t come from the Arabic alphabet,” Khouri muses.
To make the full-size sculptures, she developed a new technique not used by anyone else. Instead of working with cement, which is porous and heavy, she took large pieces of condensed relative of Styrofoam and started carving. The tactile nature of the work touched her soul. “When you spend 10 hours a day carving those letters, you’re physically on top of the pieces, inside the pieces, and it’s as if it becomes a part of me…”.
In the physical act of carving, slowly revealing letters that had so much personal resonance emerge, her own feelings about her past were also drawn out. “With age we become more in touch with our origins, what built us, what’s remained in there,” she says. “I became very nostalgic, very emotional. This is when I realized I was doing something big.”
The individual sculptures, which are light enough to slide into position and are beautiful in their own right, fit into each other like a maze of bleached bones, washed onto the gallery floor by some giant, unseen wave. The project took six months and Khouri couldn’t have done it without a team of fellow artists who helped her with the endless task of sanding and coating the sculptures in a durable, water-resistant finish that she compares to “a talc powder feel.” She also needed the invitation of Equinox Gallery owner Andy Sylvester to make such a project even seem feasible.
When the exhibit opens it will be the first time she’s seen the sculptures in their entirety — she was still carving two letters in the final weeks leading up to the show. She will do five sets; each collector will have one letter plus a maquette of all the pieces. One set will be kept as the full sentence.
Khouri rubs her hand along one of the pieces, feeling the connection to the words and the art itself.
“Regardless of what we go through, life is beautiful…. The pain, the sorrow, the difficulties — everything has made me who I am. To me, beauty is important. It’s what prevails.”
Let’s Sit and Talk is at Equinox Gallery (525 Great Northern Way), along with sculptures by Dempsey Bob, from June 7 to July 15. The artists’ reception is June 7 from 2 to 4 pm.
EquinoxGallery.com | Khouri.net
