Fogo Island Gallery presented “The Year of the Whale”, the first solo exhibition in Canada of Berlin-based artist Isa Melsheimer’s work. Curated by Alexandra McIntosh (Director of Programs and Exhibitions of Fogo Island Arts) and Nicolaus Schafhausen (Director of Kunsthalle Wien and Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts), the show features a series of gouaches on paper and a large-scale embroidered curtain made last fall, when Melsheimer’s took part in Fogo Island Arts’ international residency program.

Isa Melsheimer’s works seek to trouble the complex, ever-evolving relationship of humans to the environment, suggesting a rebalancing of power structures and permeable boundaries between species. “Curtain (The Year of the Whale)” (2018), a seven by three-meter hand-dyed and embroidered fabric curtain, depicts the artist’s view from Squish Studio – the white, trapezium-shaped building by architect Todd Saunders, sited on a rocky strip of coastline on Fogo Island.

The layered, multiview-point imagery of the curtain conveys a feeling of the immensity of the ocean, as well as the passage of time, thus criticizing the all-knowing and domineering attitude towards nature typical of the Western tradition. Additionally, four gouaches on paper depict iconic brutalist buildings emerging from dramatic darkened or red-infused skies and encroached by massive sea creatures – a reflection on human structures amidst an environment that is at once threatening and fascinating.

Opening image: Isa Melsheimer, Curtain, The Year of the Whale, 2018, fabric and thread