February 16 – March 13
Nicole Bauberger: Listening to the Mountains

… we are not before the image as if before a thing whose exact limits we would know how to trace. The sum of positive coordinates – author, date, technique, iconography – is clearly not enough. An image, each image, gathers together and is the result of movements that have tentatively sedimented or crystallised.1

Listening to the Mountain brings to Montreal a series of two summersfull of paintings made by Nicole Bauberger of the mountain that goes by the name of Pilot’s peak or Mount Vines (nicknamed by the artist “the mountain with ears”) in Yukon’s Tombstone range. The series, made in the years 2003 and 2005, carries forth a consistent engagement with the idea of dialogue that has been a hallmark of Bauberger’s work since the late 1990s. Bauberger, a storyteller as well as a painter, is attuned to the narratives that accrue through time in the prolonged and thoughtful encounter that can take place between artist and subject. In the earlier Artemisia series, a sustained act of re-imaging the works of Gentileschi was, in a sense, a re-imagining undertaken through the careful absorption and re-telling of the 16th century artist’s experience of painting. The performance over time of the learning and retelling bears strong links to the structure of storytelling, and reminds us of the deep and often all-too-easily-forgotten – perhaps, denied – links between visual and oral culture. These are bonds that challenge the status of the teller of stories, of the artist, in a culture of individualism: for her or his virtuosity is balanced by the power of the telling that is carried. The image surges up, through the notes and queries of speech and vision, and at times the listening becomes so strong that the tale alone seems to be before us. Accounting for this seems to require, in turn, a different way of speaking.
The paintings are deployed across an expanse of panels. Each panel is square, a place within place, a moment of being equally connected to the extent of our outstretched arms and to the scales of ascent and fall that our gazing rehearses. The panels mark rhythms; with each one, our listening anew reveals the mountain as scape, as a measure of time, as our encounter in time. The mountain is a season: leave these paintings installed for the season’s worth of days that their number suggests, and return to visit a new one tomorrow, and another the following day, just one at a time: be aware of the ones to come, the ones left behind. Your peripheral memory will, through remembered anticipation, translate the experience of mountain.

It will be an experience made in the topography of paint. There, cascades of opacity and transparency, each one by turns paper-thin and deep with matter. Here, strong swift overlapping strokes that quickly seized the sky of that day and set down the great mountainside’s weight: but angle sideways and the flank is suddenly the original calm horizon that gave way to the surging sea beds hoisted to buttress the sky. The craggy snow-covered skins, the tender supple lowland wheat-coloured waves, are fields defined by the mountain’s edge, so often a shaft of intense light, a premonition of the sun beyond. There is crestlight, edgelight, matterlight. Iridescent passages of iron-tinged metallics, bright unfathomable hues of sky, colours like a limitless dictionary of rain: alizarins, violets, prussian blues, browns: composites that Ruskin commended for the rich and true harmonies of grey in the world. Above the world, companions to the mountains’ songs, the cloudscapes are the unannounced answering spirits, their nether reaches shorelines listing and crossing over the rocky crests.

The two sets of lithocoal drawings were completed in 2006 and represent a series of composite views based on photographs taken by the artist facing North and South from the top of Pilot’s Peak; a measure of a return gaze from the mountain so patiently studied in the 2003-2005 paintings. Although made thanks to the ascent of the mountain, and to the referenced Dempster Highway visible in the distance, the choice to make their image without the same ideas of colour, texture and support delivers us to a nearly impossible terrain. Rectangles of tracing paper that sometimes billow at our passing, recompose the mountain as an image of lived and forbidding distance, unscalable, pieced together like aerial or satellite surveys that deliver the image of