Julie Tremblay opens a site-specific installation In Your House at The Invisible Dog

About

The project is concerned with occupying and transforming a site, which in this case is a glass house. A glass house lacks a boundary a house usually provides: an opaque separation of the inside from the outside. Influenced by the contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton who advocates for the interconnectivity of all things (living and non-living), Tremblay creates an immersive installation that plays with the idea of inside/outside or the lack of thereof.

Tremblay employs spray-painted aluminum mesh and LED lights as primary materials for the construction of an environment that challenges special perception and alters dimensional understanding of reality. She comments on the inspiration behind this project: “We live in a time where scientists make discoveries and make hypotheses that constantly put into question our understanding of space and time, its order and our place within it. It makes the continuum of space and time, as we’ve seemingly constructed it, collapse.”

Julie Tremblay was born in Québec City, Canada in 1972. She received her Bachelor degree in Fine Arts from Université Laval in Quebec in 1995. Later that year she moved to Brooklyn to pursue her MFA at Pratt Institute, receiving a mention of excellence upon its completion in 1997. Apart from a 5-year hiatus during which she lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, Tremblay has been living and working in Brooklyn since then. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Europe and Mexico.

Tremblay uses industrial and/or re-purposed materials to make visually impactful sculptures, installations and performances that bridge nature, industry and technology, and explore the nature of representation as well as our place in the world.

In 2012, CBS named her as one of  ”5 best up and coming NYC artists.” Other recent press include feature articles in Surface Magazine China, Creative Quarterly, Nu-Modé Magazine, just to name a few.

In 2013, she was awarded a residency with the prestigious Parisian gallery ”Galerie RX,” where she spent the summer in their gigantic space in Ivry-sur-Seine, former scientific laboratory of the Frédéric Joliot-Curie, making a large site-specific installation.

Most recently, she has been working on 2 very large scale sculptural commissions: one that is hanging in the atrium lobby of a new movie theater in Marham, Ontario and the other will be the center piece of the 80,000 sq ft store of Canadian, fashion-forward retailer La Maison Simons, in Gatineau, Quebec.

About The Invisible Dog Art Center

The Invisible Dog Art Center opened in October, 2009, as a raw space in a vast converted factory building with a charmed history [it was formerly a factory] and an open-ended mission: to create, from the ground up, a new kind of interdisciplinary arts center. Over the last two years, over 50,000 people have attended their events: visual art exhibits; dance, theater, and music performances; film screenings; literary arts and poetry readings; lectures; community events; and more.

Long-term collaborations with artists are integral to The Invisible Dog’s mission, which is to create not only a new kind of art center, but also a new kind of artistic community. 
The Invisible Dog brings together artists of all career stages, offering them unique opportunities for involvement and has evolved organically, developing with and alongside its diverse roster of collaborators.

The Invisible Dog’s core values of experimentation and collaboration are kept in view throughout the curatorial process, and as a result, its artists are autonomous in their choices.

The building at 51 Bergen Street is integral to The Invisible Dog’s identity. Built in the late 1800s, the 30,000 square-foot building housed working factories until the 1990s, when the last factory shut down and the detritus of 100 years of industry was left to rot. The building was unused until 2008, when it was discovered and renovated by Lucien Zayan. The last factory, which made belts, had a hit in the 1960s with the “invisible dog” party trick, which gave the nascent art center its name.