May 2014
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
HERMAN RUHLAND / New Sculptures
May 2 – June 1, 2014
Vernissage Friday May 2 / 7 – 10pm
Herman Ruhland’s works provide the chance to read liberations of form and memories within material. LPM Gallery will showcase the recent works of Herman Ruhland, a Dutch-born sculptor and painter who has been a friend to the gallery for many years. Ruhland moved to Canada in 1959, and with a background in horticulture, began designing Japanese inspired gardens. Currently Ruhland lives on a farm outside of Ottawa. His artistic practice has developed on the reworking and assembling of found objects and seemingly disparate materials.
Ruhland’s sculpture works press against the imagined limit of what is figure or what constitutes as figurative. In encountering cultural signifiers, natural forms, bodies and parts together and by non-traditional means, viewers must reach within themselves and sift through their personal memories to create meaning.
Using traditionally undervalued materials by the academy such wood, scrap metal and discarded or forgotten forms, the intention of form, and meanings within models are turned on their head and reversed. Ruhland’s process is not simply a resistance to dominant, fashionable materials of art-marking, rather it is the acting out of a freedom of form. In such a way, the sculptures brush against an archetype of modernist assemblage, but with a deeply personal, contemporaneous sensibility.
Ruhland’s sculptures highlight the phenomenological aspect of reading three-dimensional forms in that we are actually looking at ourselves, and searching through our own embodiment of the viewing experience. In a double bind of variance and grace, hard, sharpened edges, manifest as welcoming surfaces. We feel the working of human hands. The dignity of Ruhland’s work rests in a felt intimacy of labor.
As a selection of primarily smaller-scaled, intimate works, this exhibition is a celebration of Herman’s fruitful career, and by extension stands as an ode to his lifelong partners, collaborators, and his late wife Margaret. – Written by Adam Barbu, Gallery Assistant & Curator of Words.