Michelle Allard
Recent activity includes the city wide Montreal Festivals Art Sounterrain and Nuit Blanche (2013), "Confection" an installation presented at the SFU Art Gallery, Burnaby, B.C., group exhibition "To Tame a Landscape", Point Exhibits Vancouver; Convenience Gallery, Toronto; "Materialscape" a solo exhibition at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery and solo work at Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria B.C. Living and working in Vancouver B.C.

Through sculpture and installation I explore possible and fabricated conditions that evade notions of stability and constancy. Negotiation is placed on fabricated circulatory systems through accumulating, layering, and repurposing various quantities of common manufactured and household materials such as polystyrene, plastics, carpeting, cardboard and office paper. My work navigates around the ideas of production, 'making', material build-up, and flow or transition. Taking in mind the formal and functional processes and boundaries found in various materials and spatial contexts.
I consider the notion that everyday materials and systems, while appearing stable and knowable, often involve a vacillation of processes that defy stabilization. It is with this in mind that I look to processes found in interior, exterior and broader contexts, through drawing on phenomena in elusive states such as organic/ inorganic growths, developments, bifurcations and formations, crystalline structures, deposits, and stratified masses.

Addendum:

Ultimately what I consider to be important to my work and varied processes is to create the largest gain with the smallest means so to speak. My interest is to employ and re-circulate materials that are malleable, unheroic and utterly mundane in my pursuit of a contemporary sublime or sublimation of sorts, to make more out of less to skirt a line between minimalism and the Neo-Baroque. The majority of my sculptures, installations, and 3 dimensional "sketches" are produced during a self defined or exhibition based finite period of time within perimeters of time, space, and material accessibility.