Karilee Fuglem
clouds moving across the valley, a place falling
Karilee Fuglem is a Canadian visual artist based in Montreal. For over thirty years, she has been developing a multidisciplinary practice that explores the concepts of perception, space, light, and presence through drawing, sculpture, installation, and site-specific interventions. Graduated from Concordia University, she has held numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, notably at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, the McClure Gallery, the Rodman Hall Art Center, and the Fonderie Darling. Her work has also been featured in major institutions, including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Montreal Biennale. She has been awarded several public art commissions, including Air de réflexion for the CHUM and En circulation for the L’Octogone Library. She is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.
Sophie Mallette holds a master's degree in art history from the Université de Montréal. Through an analysis of works by Lynne Cohen and Péristyle Nomade, her thesis examines the capacity of art to reveal the creative and subversive potential contained within the apparent banality of the places we encounter in the everyday. She is interested in the relationships between places — particularly urban ones — and questions of power, reappropriation, and what contributes to the act of dwelling, a reflection she explores notably through her writing practice. Through attention to the subtle and to subjectivity, she seeks to reveal the sensitive and political dimensions of what often goes unnoticed.
Being there: the words seem simple, almost self-evident, and yet they are tinged with ambivalence. For often, they express less a certainty than an impression – one that is fragile, wavering, and always shifting.
In the exhibition clouds moving across the valley, a place falling, Karilee Fuglem explores this tension between the concrete and the intangible. Taking inspiration from a private experience of grief and loss, she reflects on our relationships with places, time, and memory. It is these events, impossible to grasp fully, that profoundly redefine how we connect with the world. Where can we find our footing when reference points suddenly fall apart?
Fuglem doesn’t claim to find answers; rather, she welcomes this elusiveness. In the gallery, her works – based on sensitive observation and experimentation – frame time in various ways. An on-site intervention conveys the present in transformation. Echoing the architecture of the room and the neighbouring buildings, an interplay of barely perceptible lines of shadow and reflection takes shape in the space. A diffuse sketch of a city, of a valley. A deliberate void, allowing us to become aware of the weight of what surrounds and inhabits us. Then, projections and photographs bear witness to passing time, not through the changing immediacy of the light but by its accumulated traces. Transposed into images, the intangible takes an unexpected form – vast and in motion. And through this immensity, we also glimpse a human presence, discreet but constant – perhaps by a window lit up late at night, perhaps through Fuglem’s own actions, which will continue for the duration of the exhibition.
From these multiple experiences of time emerge other cartographies, drawn on both spatiality and intimacy. From the gallery to her studio, and even to her father’s house, Fuglem weaves lines that emerge from the imperceptible ubiquity of things. Between absence and presence, being here and being there.
— Sophie Mallette
Translated by Käthe Roth
Karilee Fuglem is a Canadian visual artist based in Montreal. For over thirty years, she has been developing a multidisciplinary practice that explores the concepts of perception, space, light, and presence through drawing, sculpture, installation, and site-specific interventions. Graduated from Concordia University, she has held numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, notably at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, the McClure Gallery, the Rodman Hall Art Center, and the Fonderie Darling. Her work has also been featured in major institutions, including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Montreal Biennale. She has been awarded several public art commissions, including Air de réflexion for the CHUM and En circulation for the L’Octogone Library. She is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.
Sophie Mallette holds a master's degree in art history from the Université de Montréal. Through an analysis of works by Lynne Cohen and Péristyle Nomade, her thesis examines the capacity of art to reveal the creative and subversive potential contained within the apparent banality of the places we encounter in the everyday. She is interested in the relationships between places — particularly urban ones — and questions of power, reappropriation, and what contributes to the act of dwelling, a reflection she explores notably through her writing practice. Through attention to the subtle and to subjectivity, she seeks to reveal the sensitive and political dimensions of what often goes unnoticed.