Impact | Mercury is also a metal

Exhibition Statement

VISA Art Gallery, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts. 
Impact | Mercury is also a metal, 2022. 

Richard Dean Irvine

Impact
There’s storytelling and then there’s good storytelling - stories that leave you wondering, questioning, and eager to know more. Irvine’s work represents the dynamic and unique delivery of his own deeply personal story about healing, recovery, and repair following the impact that trauma and injury has had on his life. Through this on-going and ever-evolving body of work, we are invited to witness the path that exists beyond trauma - the momentum forward along that path; the rugged terrain, as well as the clearings, along the way. Irvine’s work represents a seriousness of purpose that at times feels random, playful, deep, and personal, all infused with a layer of intense emotional honesty.

Marcel Grimard

Mercury is also a metal
Grimard’s work offers an invitation to consider what deep and continuous returns to the self might resemble. Within this personal process and within the work itself, there is a careful consideration of the shape-shifting nature of material, emotion, colour, and form. Grimard brings into play the powerful metaphor of mercury which both guides his personal artistic practice as well as our own receptivity to the works, immersing viewers in what feels like continuously shifting liminal spaces of identity, fluidity and unpredictability. Being able to return to its original form, mercury’s unique properties have a direct affect on its behaviour, which mirrors the very curious ways that Grimard’s objects of introspection allow us the personal space to fluctuate, experientially, take on new forms, and return, again, back to the self.

Sonya Marie de Lazzer 
Gallery Coordinator 
VISA Art Gallery 
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts