ABOUT
Spring Hurlbut’s installations, sculpture, video and photography possess an aesthetic continuity that resonates in the tension
between clear, minimal means, and complex subject matter. Emerging in the early 1980s among a generation of artists who
challenged the limitations of the museum, Spring Hurlbut was recognized at home and abroad for temporary architectural
installations that established the themes of presence and absence elaborated in her mature oeuvre.
By the mid 1990s her interest in the realms of life and death led to ambitious projects inspired by collections. Working with
objects and specimens in the possession of museums of natural history in Canada and abroad, Spring Hurlbut cut unconventional
paths through familiar orthodoxies of display, eschewing chronology and fixed hierarchies, transforming collection displays based
on the idea of preserving an illusion of life to recast the museum as a cultural mausoleum. These interventions remain significant
to international discourse about the role of the museum today.
In her recent work Spring Hurlbut unsentimentally envisions our inevitable destiny in death while acknowledging the resurgent
continuum of life. Solemn and starkly refined, her photographs are also richly detailed and arrestingly beautiful. They capture
something more elusive than the familiar role photography plays in remembrance and commemoration. How to make art with
such intimate and rarely manipulated material as cremation ashes? How to quantify a life? Spring Hurlbut’s commitment to a
subject commonly avoided in Western culture is singular and courageous!
- Jessica Bradley, Independent Curator and Consultant.
Spring Hurlbut is based in Toronto and is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto.
