Steel Doily #5, Cal Lane, 2004

Steel Doily #5,

Cal Lane, 2004, oxy-acetylene cut steel, 36" x 0.75"

Rust Print, Cal Lane, 2004

Rust Print,

2004, rust and paper, 31.5" x 31"

Rust print #1, Cal Lane, 2004

Rust print #1,

2004, rust and paper, 31.5" x 31"

Rust print #2, Cal Lane, 2004

Rust print #2,

2004, rust and paper, 31.5" x 31"

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Steel Doily #5, Cal Lane, 2004Rust Print, Cal Lane, 2004Rust print #1, Cal Lane, 2004Rust print #2, Cal Lane, 2004

CAL LANE

1968-

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Lane was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and grew up in Saanichton, BC. She returned to Halifax to complete her BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Lane has exhibited and been collected widely in Canada and the United States, including galleries in Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Halifax and Victoria.

She states about her work;

“I like to work as a visual devil’s advocate, using contradiction as a vehicle for finding my way to an empathetic image, an image of opposition that creates a balance – as well as a clash – by comparing and contrasting ideas and materials. This manifested in a series of “Industrial Doilies”, pulling together industrial and domestic life as well as relationships of strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, practical and frivolity, ornament and function. There is also a secondary relationship being explored here, of lace used in religious ceremonies as in weddings, christenings and funerals.”

For her 2004 exhibition at WTG, Lane presented new works including steel doilies, rust (doily) prints and a dirt installation. She uses her welding background (she worked as a welder in the construction industry for several years before working towards her BFA) and her fine art studies (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in this body of work to merge the heavy, often grim features associated with construction materials, and the delicate ornamentation associated with the lace patterns that she refers to. The dirt installation is sifted through a lace material as icing sugar onto a cake. This sifted dirt becomes light and fragile revealing Lane’s current preoccupation with the ephemeral.

Ray Cronin, Curator of Contemporary Art for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, suggested in his essay for the AGNS publication Fabricate, a 2002 solo exhibition of Lane’s work, that Lane’s work contributes to central aspects of artistic discourse, including “’high’ versus ‘low’ arts, the distinction between ‘crafts’ and ‘art’, and the relative merit attached to work that has been primarily practiced by women.”

Addressing her own work from this exhibition, Lane was quoted in the Halifax Herald as saying, “I examine social and cultural ideas by working with visual codes. I appreciate how three-dimensional form involves the space we are in, how it becomes a part of the world, without an obvious function.”

Exhibitions from 2002-2012: on the archived WTG site.