Janice Kerbel, Weathervane, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist and Crest Nicholson. Photo: James Harris.
Synopsis
Developed as part of the public art scheme for Crest Nicholson’s waterside development, Weathervane is an integrated artwork by London based artist Janice Kerbel.
Description
Janice Kerbel works with a range of materials, including drawing, text, audio and print, to explore the indefinite space between reality and fiction, and between abstraction and representation. Her work frequently involves extensive research, and takes the forms of plans, proposals, scripts or announcements for imaginative scenarios that cannot or will not actually happen. In conveying these imagined events, Kerbel draws upon the potentiality of language and text.
Designed in stainless steel to complement the galvanised steel plant room on the HBOS plc building Kerbel’s artwork is a deceptively simple structure. Constructed with all the traditional features of a weathervane, with an arrow showing wind direction, it also has symbolic links to the world of finance. It displays mankind’s ability to predict changes in weather conditions alongside the forecasting of market conditions within the business world. The weathervane also has a third link with Bristol’s history as a seafaring port.
Janice Kerbel
Janice Kerbel was born in 1969 in Toronto. She completed her BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and an MA at Goldsmiths College at the University of London). She has held teaching positions at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and Goldsmiths College, where she currently teaches.
Kerbel’s work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at The Arts Club of Chicago, Art Now Tate Britain (London), the Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), Chisenhale Gallery (London), the Kitchener/Waterloo Art Gallery, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), and Moderna Musset (Stockholm), among many others.
Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions across North America and Europe, such as in Kolnischer Kunstverein (Cologne), the Bucharest Biennial 5, British Art Show 6 (Newcastle), ICA (London), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), de Appel (Amsterdam), Musee des beaux-arts (Montreal), and Biennale de Montreal, among many others.
She was a Sobey Art Award finalist in 2006 and received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2011. She is represented in Canada by Catriona Jeffries Gallery (Vancouver), and in Europe by greengrassi (London, UK), Galerie Karin Guenther (Hamburg), and i8 Gallery (Reykjavik). Janice Kerbel lives and works in London (UK).
