Maya Beaudry discusses The Pergola, a site-specific work at Contemporary Calgary, 4 November 2021 – 30 January 2022. Download Maya’s interactive presentation below.
Maya Beaudry, The Pergola, 2021 (detail).
Maya Beaudry’s site-specific installation The Pergola considers the idea of interiority and containment as it relates to the natural and the built environment. Wrapped in a fabric printed with photographs of dwelling spaces, and buttressed by an organic wire growth, the pergola offers a structural fluidity of being between inside and outside; and between intention and spontaneity. The photographic fabric embodies the man-made along with all the memories of places lived and imagined, while the wound wire suggests a more instinctual, natural and fungal growth. Punctuating this threshold is Beaudry’s interest in investigating the potentiality of alternative architecture—one that is laborious, hand-made, somewhat enigmatic, and is in opposition to the dominant discourse.
Beaudry’s practice draws largely on the language of patterns in urban design and architecture. Fused with organic interruptions, she complicates the logic of the grid—that pervasive infrastructure that has become synonymous with urban living, from the block, and city to the pixels on our screens. The Pergola then can also be understood as a portrait of a hypercomplex system that mediates planned and entropic growth, safety and entanglement. It is a way to find meaning in how we inhabit spaces.
Online Resources
Artist Maya Beaudry discusses her solo exhibition The Pergola.
Includes extended text by Kayla Ephros.
Maya Beaudry with her artwork, The Pergola, 2021 (detail).
Biography
Maya Beaudry
(she/her)
Maya Beaudry is based in Vancouver, BC. She received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2017. She has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, Germany and France, with solo exhibitions in Berlin and Marseille. She was the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists, the Felix Gonzales Torres Foundation Travel Grant, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts/CD Howe Award, and has participated in residencies at Triangle France in Marseille and September Spring at the Kesey Farm.