STATEMENT
I am fascinated both by materials and by philosophies of matter. Specifically, I’m curious how we perceive ourselves in relation to the physical world and how these intrinsic perceptions are paralleled, metaphorically, by the act of creating visual objects.
In consequence, I’ve been thinking in terms of new materialist philosophies which are an environmentalist and feminist way to interpret the interactions between internal perceptions and the external world. Fluctuating between representation and abstraction, my artworks use the malleability of visual language to address these ambiguities of perception.
I am currently painting with an oil emulsion on plaster where the pigment and surface become inseparable, much as we are inseparable from our physical environment. I think of the paintings as objects in the world and so place the works in conversations amongst themselves and with the space around them. By filtering my own experiences of place and body through neo-materialist thought processes and the act of painting itself, images surface, hover indeterminately. The paintings reference an almost schizophrenic understanding of the rhizomatic nature of all and everything, while brooding on specific moments of intra-activity. The paint soaks into the surface, and yet is removable by sanding and scraping. The images are permitted to emerge, and then rebutted. The interpretation of image, or the hunt for it thus evokes an awareness of perception; the paintings, as objects, take over some of the control. My paintings address the inextricability of meaning, nonsense, myself, or the world, from myself, itself: from matter.
BIO
Esther Hoflick is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of materiality, memory, and abstraction. She holds a B.A. Honours in Studio Arts from the University of Guelph (2007) with a minor in English Literature, and an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2019).
From 2019 to 2024, Hoflick was a Fine Arts professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Northwestern Polytechnic in Northern Alberta. Now based in Montreal, she is focusing on her artistic practice, supported by an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant for As The Light Comes In, a multidisciplinary project examining perception and interconnectivity. Her work continues to tour across Alberta with TREX.
Hoflick co-founded Night Owl Contemporary, a gallery for emerging artists in Montreal, and directed The Living Art Room, a community-based art school. She has worked as a curator for Artbomb Montreal and received a grant from the Québec Jeunes Volontaires program. Her work has been exhibited at Artspace (Peterborough), the Art Gallery of Guelph, Espace Projet (Montreal), Galerie UQO (Gatineau), and Gallery Karsh-Masson (Ottawa), among others
