Jaimie Robson + Maya Ersan: Mere Phantoms Winter Garden

Winter Garden is a large-scale immersive shadow installation that explores historical structures built to possess and colonize plants from all over the world. First built in 19th-century Europe, winter gardens were structures made of cast iron and plate glass to house collections of exotic foliage. These indoor gardens served as a testament to the power and wealth of those with the means to possess them, and to the power and technological knowledge possessed by whomever built them. This exhibition at the McClure Gallery combines the delicacy of cut paper with imagery inspired by historical winter garden structures at two Montreal locations: The Verdun Greenhouses and the Montreal Botanical Gardens.

By drawing on the colonial origins of these elaborate indoor gardens, this exhibition connects contemporary migration, displacement and housing struggles with a historical lineage of systemic dispossession of plants, animals, and humans. In Winter Garden, Mere Phantoms artists Jaimie Robson and Maya Ersan use the fragility of cut paper to reflect on the crude politics of spaces built to house living things. This installation also invites viewers to engage with themes such as gentrification, urban renewal, migration, belonging, and ownership.

Come explore the shadows of these beautifully complex vignettes created by Mere Phantoms,  where you may bring to light and reveal the constructions’ intricacies and underbellies. 

Mere Phantoms is a Montreal-based duo (Jaimie Robson & Maya Ersan) who combine intricate paper cutouts, drawings, and porcelain to create installations and performances. The work that Ersan and Robson have been creating together since 2012 is inspired by shadow puppetry, animation, and early cinema, yet is distinct from these traditions. The artists place their intricate three-dimensional “sets” in front of the projection screen. By combining multiple hand-held light sources, the artists and their audiences take on an active role to animate the artwork, playing with the size, scale, and intensity of the layered shadows that are cast, thus exploring audience/performer relationships and the opportunity for interplay between the two. 

Maya Ersan (from Istanbul, Turkey) and Jaimie Robson (from Victoria, BC) both hold Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from Emily Carr University (Vancouver, 2003, and 2002). Jaimie has an MA (Media Studies) from Concordia University (2012).

https://www.merephantoms.com/

McClure Gallery thanks the Conseil des arts de Montréal for its financial support.