M. LeBlanc, Chicago (IL)
Manal Kara and Vincent Laroche
M. LeBlanc shows new works in ceramics and painting, by Montreal-based Vincent Larouche (Canadian, b. 1995) and the Indiana-based Manal Kara (Moroccan- American, b. 1986), respectively. Each artist employs metonymic markers of contemporaneity, building distillations that give value and definition to the transformative role art has on our perception of the image today.
Kara presents four of their latest ceramic cartouche works. Often text-driven, inscribed and glazed in ceramic, Kara’s work expresses a radical aesthetic philosophy of the other as a political agent in the erasure of anthropocentrism in an emerging post-human world. Images from the artist’s immediate environment, where a lakeshore national park meets an abandoned deindustrialized steel town, are printed onto silk, forming if only to leave hollow through banality, the work’s traditional center. New to the artist’s practice, Kara will create works for Art-o-rama in their first language, French.
Larouche will present four new paintings, each indicative of the artist’s extension of the discipline as a lived and processual practice. Frequent to Larouche’s practice is the idea of painting as a living being. Navigating the internet, gaming, and traditional televisual subjects, his constellation of subjects cyclically iterate and reiterate questions of how the meaning is created today and how is our shared perception of art changed by the virtual world that confronts us.
Manal Kara (b. 1986) is a Moroccan-American artist living in Gary, Indiana. Recent solo exhibitions of Kara’s work include The Viewing-Room vs. The Adoring Gaze (2020) at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn; Song Of The Other Worm (2019) at Prairie in Chicago; and 100% Raw Acid House Hoes Against Empire & Capital at Boyfriends in Chicago. Selected recent group exhibitions of Kara’s work include Jupiter Finger (2021) at Real Pain in Los
Angeles and Suspended Disbelief (2021) at Arsenal Contemporary in Toronto.
Vincent Larouche (b. 1995) lives and works in Montreal. Recent exhibitions of Larouche’s work include Café de Flore (2021) at Interstate Projects in New York, Ocelle (2020) at Fonderie
Darling in Montreal, and Coch/Lear/Sweat at NEW WORKS (2019) in Chicago. Larouche’s work was also included in This Sacred Vessel Part III at Arsenal Contemporary in New York. In 2019, Larouche received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. The artist received his D.E.C. from the Cegep du Vieux Montréal (2012-2014) and a B.F.A (2014-2017) from Concordia University in Montreal.
