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Canadian Art Magazine Features Cover Artwork by Mimi Gellman

Cover of Canadian Art Magazine Mimi Gellman
Image courtesy Mimi Gellman.
Mimi Gellman, 'Invisible Landscapes,' 2017. Conte on Japanese Obonai paper, 63.5 x 48.3 cm.
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By Perrin Grauer

Posted on | Updated

The work by the ECU Associate Professor is part of a drawing practice which explores the 'architecture of consciousness.'

Artwork by artist and ECU Associate Professor Mimi Gellman was selected to appear on the cover of the current issue of Canadian Art magazine.

The gleaming, otherworldly image graces the magazine's issue on antimatter — a subject which "presents a mirror world of abstract phenomena: time reversals, mutual annihilation, cosmic rays, cloud chambers, an infinite sea of sub-atomic particles that parallels our 'real' world of matter," according to the issue's editors.

Mimi describes her work as approaching some of the affinities between the biological, the perceptual, the cultural and the astronomical.

"My drawings do not explore the exterior world we perceive but rather what I call the 'architecture of consciousness' which permits us to perceive it," she says.

"Recalling astronomical diagrams and reflecting the mixture of hybrid cultural worldviews in my background, they reveal deep similarities between the dimension explored by sub-atomic physics and the implicit interiority of contemporary art."

The antimatter edition of Canadian Art also carries a feature article on Ingrid Koenig's and Randy Lee Cutler's Leaning Out of Windows project — an ongoing exploratory collaboration between artists, physicists and scholars.

Mimi's cover art was created for the first phase of the LOoW project. An exhibition of works from the latest phase of LOoW, called Leaning Out of Windows: Emergence, is currently showing at ECU's Michael O'Brian Exhibition Commons and RBC Media Gallery.

Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi (Ojibway-Jewish Métis) visual artist and educator with a multi-streamed practice in architectural glass and conceptual installation. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is completing her research praxis PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University on the metaphysics of Indigenous mapping.

Mimi’s interdisciplinary work explores her interests in phenomenology and technologies of intuition through an embodied practice of walking and mapping and through works and installations that point to the existence of the animacy and agency of objects. The cross-cultural dialogue exemplified in her work suggests a pre-existing connection to the other-than-human worlds. It is her cosmological orientation, in other words, her Ojibwe/Métis worldview and the language that expresses it that predisposes her to be open to the reality of the spirit and life of objects and their ability to communicate across diverse thresholds.

She continues to exhibit internationally, with recent exhibitions in France, Germany and Tokyo and was included in the seminal exhibition, “On line” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011. Her work can be found in the collections of Price-Waterhouse, Kraft/General Foods Corporation, the Toronto Transit Commission and Rogers Stadium, among others.