As part of our grand opening event on Saturday, November 6, 2010, Plug In ICA presents “Mountain of Shame”.

This exhibition premieres a remarkable new body of work by distinguished Winnipeg artist Eleanor Bond. The paintings and sculptures in “Mountain of Shame” offer reflections on the enigmas and complexities of existence through the (im)materiality of painting. Full of rich and lurid colours, these works evoke the fantastical, while still referencing familiar built and natural worlds. One monumental-scaled painting is a collage of mutating forms and energies that calls to mind diverse phenomena: brain activity, electronic data, biomorphic forces, bodily interiors and weather events. The psycho- spatial fields of these works suggest a type of cognitive mapping of indeterminate places and situations. They are of nowhere and everywhere at the same time, even if titled as specific locations. Moving away from the journalistic content of earlier images, here ideas about the unknowable are generated through a synaesthetic experience. Bond exploits the materiality of paint using techniques ranging from protruding accretions to atmospheric transparencies in a way that emphasizes the phenomenology of apprehension. As responses to an often catastrophic and over-stimulated world, her works can be seen as projections of the processes of making sense of such conditions. The scope of works in this exhibition, from a spatially baroque spectacle to quiet interiors and a diminutive “Mountain of Shame,” substantiate the range and depth of Eleanor Bond’s inquiries.

Eleanor Bond has exhibited widely since the mid -1980s with solo exhibitions across Canada and internationally, including the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Witte de With in Rotterdam and the Museo de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo in Brazil. The Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal in 1998, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1990 and Gallery 1.1.1 at the University of Manitoba in 1989, have produced touring solo exhibitions and catalogues. Her work has been included in major exhibitions at the Montreal Biennale, Third International Istanbul Biennial, Barbican Art Gallery in London, National Gallery of Canada and the Sao Paulo Biennial. Her art is in major collections and has been featured in many publications. She is Associate Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. This touring exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on Bond’s practice.