All at once

Wikipedia says that the Milan Cathedral took 579 years to build. This work was sustained by faith, a belief in the continuity of a world where one’s great great grandchildren would pray in the future cathedral, and by the satisfaction of contributing to something beyond oneself.

In our secular world, faith has faltered, but the desire for our lives to have a purpose and a meaning beyond mere survival is still strong. Hopefully, we can find this meaning in family, friends, community and art. Together we can try to address the interrelated problems of this precarious world and work toward building a world we want to live in. We can’t build a cathedral by ourselves.

Gathering the unwieldy news of the day - the tumult, contradictions, violence, and vitality - with dozens of figures, Libby Hague shapes sculptures, prints and stories about vulnerability, war, migration, Alzheimer’s, love, death and dancing. It’s not just an angry world; it can be a splendid world. It is the only one we have. It is everything all at once.

Libby Hague RCA, BFA (Honours), Concordia University, is a Toronto printmaker and a member of Open Studio. Her curiosity and inventiveness inform her hybrid practice of large, immersive print installations examining human and social relationships in our precarious world. Recent exhibitions include My Story of Sublimation at SNAP in Edmonton; Simple Gifts, Open Studio, Toronto; The past is never over, a Retrospective, Gallery of Mississauga;  Every Heart can Grow Bigger, Gallery Stratford, later transformed for O.D.D. Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon; On this Wondrous Sea, Karachi Biennale, Pakistan; International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland; International Artist's Book Biennale, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.

During my residency at Centre SAGAMIE, I'm taking the liberty of exploring various series of intimate works that will be presented in my upcoming exhibition All at once at Laval's Salle Alfred-Pellan. The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.