The world she lives in
Seated in her brightly lit apartment, surrounded by bold, angular, animalistic metal, bronze and wood sculptures of her own making, 93-year-old artist Shirley Berk Simon mulls over a question about how her creations come into being.
“It’s just spontaneous expression, whatever happens with it, or how it goes,” Berk Simon says. “I don’t draw it out first, or make up my mind that I’m going to make an exact copy of something; I do everything spontaneously.”
An exhibition of Berk Simon’s ink drawings, sculptures and installations, entitled Le monde où je vis, is on display at Le Centre d’exposition de Repentigny until April 15. The show's curator is none other than her daughter, Sherry Simon, a professor in Concordia’s Études françaises department.
Many of Berk Simon’s sculptures bear a playful resemblance to different animals and creatures, but the artist is careful not to let them become recognizable. Her installations, on the other hand, are emphatic statements about society, illness, life and death.
For much of her career, Berk Simon was a physiotherapist, working in hospitals. This experience informed her installations. “These are interrogative works, confronting serious and fundamental issues: how do we react to the suffering of the aged, to the distress of those who are marginalized from society?” writes her daughter in her introduction to the exhibition.
One of Berk Simon’s installations, entitled No exit, Par Choix, consists of a wheelchair shrouded in black material, with a large white cauliflower on the seat (representing the brain), and a small watering can suspended over the seat (representing the act of keeping it alive).
“My ideas have changed on a lot of things,” she says, referring to the installation, created during the 1990s, which addresses people’s right, or lack thereof, to choose when they die. “It was a pretty sad type of a thing.”
So, Berk Simon quite literally brightened up the installation for her exhibition. “In recent years I’ve found that for many people, at many times, death is a friend, and it can be a release, and so I decided to incorporate a video of the rising sun, and that’s the way it’s shown now.”
With her installations, Berk Simon found an outlet to address what she calls her “baggage.” But she always returned to sculpture. Over the years, she experimented with all sorts of materials. She travelled to the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende, well known for its artistic community, where she took a course in welding. The experience transformed her approach to sculpture.
“I became fascinated with welding and metal,” she says.” I worked in an extension of a beautiful old, stone building, which had walls, but no roof. So I was actually working outside ... It was marvelous for me.”
For ten years, Berk Simon and her husband spent the month of February in the Mexican town. He created jewelery and she welded her sculptures. “(Welding) was a flashpoint in her existence, a moment when she became especially aware of the force of her own creativity,” her daughter writes.
Berk Simon created her most recent sculptures in her workshop at home from whatever came to hand. “I was doing some inks, which I love doing … and then I got lonely for my sculpture,” she says. “I started to fool around, and I ended up with these animaloid figures that move, that I just made from paper, tar paper, and electric tape and chopsticks, anything that I thought was fun to do.”
Gallery Director François Renaud curated a previous exhibit of Berk Simon’s work in Repentigny, but this time he wanted to do something different. He approached Sherry Simon with the idea of curating her mother’s show.
For Simon, it was a challenge to approach her mother’s artwork from a more detached, curatorial standpoint, “because she’s first of all my mother, and because I love her artwork because it’s part of my life, too.” Even so, she says it was something she enjoyed doing very much.
“What’s interesting about my mother’s work and especially about this show, is that it runs the gamut of emotions from the most serious and the gravest reflections of life and death, to very playful and joyful creations. My mother chose the theme The World I Live In, which, the more I think about it, is absolutely appropriate. Because it’s that world, it’s everything that enters into that world.”
The exhibition comes to a close Sunday, April 15.
Related link:
• Exhibition information