Badanna Zack: Black & White

Badanna Zack is a sculptor and conceptual artist born in Montreal, QC, and now lives and works in Toronto. Zack emerged as a sculpture artist during the Minimalist movement, from which she rebelled against to emerge as a unique sculptor with a bold and dissenting voice. Renowned as a provocateur of Canadian art, Zack is known for her papier-mâché, soft sculpture, and large-scale replicas of everyday objects.

In this solo exhibition, Zack presents a new installation entitled 'Zebra Staircase', alongside a selection of papier-mâché pieces from earlier in the artist's career. 

 In Black and White, Zebra Staircase stands completed, propped against a wall that seemingly cuts it off at its core, giving the staircase the illusion of coiling through the wall. The zebra print is activated by the sculpture’s placement against the gallery’s expectantly white walls: each of the black stairs has cut out ridges, so against the white gallery, zebra stripes emerge. Zebra Staircase combines many of the themes charged through Zack’s decades-long career. The artist’s conflicted relationship to art institutions is represented in the gallery wall, which the staircase has no choice but to lean on in order to stand, and in order for its stripes to emerge. The white wall, which is so symbolic of institutional gatekeeping, stands erect between a staircase that seemingly circles around it. The suggestion of intercourse between wall and object draws the artist’s career full circle, recalling her earliest erotic artworks from the early ’70s. This intercourse also represents the entanglement between artist and the sexist frameworks that has shaped her career, both in her thematic preoccupations and in her unwelcome reception by the boy’s club that dictated the art scene during her coming of age.