The Power Plant

Solo Exhibition

Karla Black

Past Exhibition

Oct 20 – Dec 30 2018

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Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Henry Chan


LEAD SPONSOR

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SUPPORT DONOR

Laura Adams & Michael Serbinis

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CURATOR

Nabila Abdel Nabi

Karla Black’s sculptures hover between sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, challenging easy categorization. Her work comprises traditional art-making media including pigment, plaster and paint alongside everyday substances such as eye shadow, Vaseline, lipstick, cotton wool and toilet paper. Black thus draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions, including expressionist painting, land art, performance and formalism. Materials are suspended in space or carefully arranged on the floor to produce a multisensory, visceral experience.

The artist is concerned with the physical properties and aesthetic possibilities of the materials she works with, rather than their symbolic or cultural connotations. Hers are self-contained gestures, not intended to draw associations with elements in the external world. In particular, Black regards language as a secondary framework to the deeply material, affective experience that her sculptures evoke. Her simultaneously delicate and monumental works often reveal traces of the artist’s process on their surface—such as fingerprints and dust—and are therefore encountered as both sculpture and site, an experimental approach that enables her audience to engage with the materials differently and encourages new ways of looking at the spaces they activate. For her exhibition at The Power Plant, the artist produced a new site-specific, immersive sculpture that engages with the particular spatial and light qualities of the gallery.

LEARN MORE
Watch Karla Black's Interview with The Power Plant

Watch Karla Black's Artist Talk at OCAD

FALL 2018 PROGRAM GUIDE

Click here to read more about The Power Plant's Fall 2018 exhibitions and programming for the season!

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Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

 Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Karla Black, 2018. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

About the Artist


Karla Black

Karla Black is a Scottish artist who creates abstract, immersive sculptures that explore physical experience as a way of communicating and understanding the world around us.

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