Exhibition Guide: Lists of works.

One of Canada’s most influential artists, Jana Sterbak has had a significant impact on contemporary art, artists, and audiences for almost 50 years. This large-scale retrospective presents a comprehensive overview of Sterbak’s work, celebrating her pivotal contributions to art history and offering a rare opportunity to experience her work firsthand. Dimensions of Intimacy features innovative early work that pushes material and sculptural norms, wearable structures that merge object with performance, significant video and film work, as well as rarely exhibited artist editions, photographs, and drawings from Sterbak’s own collection.

Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now known as Czechia), Sterbak left with her parents after the Soviet invasion, moving west and settling in Canada. Though she has maintained a home and studio in Montréal for many years, Sterbak remains connected to Europe, where most of her extensive exhibitions and professional life have taken place, and from where she draws her sense of skepticism, irony, and dark humour. Sterbak’s biography provides a study of contrasts, most notably between the personal and the public or political, and between freedom and dependence— an existential foundation from which she unsympathetically scrutinizes the human condition.

Provocative material exploration is central to Sterbak’s practice. Often noted as being difficult to classify by medium or style, it is precisely this resistance to conformity that makes her material choices so surprising and powerful. Influenced initially by minimalism, her unconventional materials are selected deliberately to express a direct relationship between material and idea. Granite, metal, or electrical wire speak to ideas of weight, permanence, or restriction. In contrast, chocolate, bread, or meat, offer an immediate association with food, and speak to value, tradition, and decomposition. Her materials are often ephemeral, intangible, or transformative, like the ice that forms the slowly melting chairs of Dissolution (Auditorium) (2001); the electricity that powers the Van de Graaff generator producing an electrostatic shock to anyone that touches Seduction Couch (1986-1987); or the raw flank steak that is stitched into a dress that over time dehydrates into a leathery skin in the much discussed and often copied Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987).

Sterbak’s materials are the stuff of everyday life; familiar objects so ordinary that we rarely give them any notice. This material approach grounds her work in the world, making it more relatable. As Sterbak has stated,

“I prefer to call my work ‘objects’ or ‘situations’, rather than ‘sculpture’. To relegate an object to the rarefied world of art negates its power to disturb and the potential for discovery. A really successful work of art has the ability to make us reconsider our perceptions—not only inside the museum, but also out in the world.” 1.

For example, the standard dressmaker’s measuring tape used in Cones on Fingers (1979) and Cones on Hand (1979) ironically transforms this simple tool of the domestic and fashion worlds into an eccentric prosthetic device for fingers or hands. These works propose a dual reading, critically addressing the unrealistic proportions imposed on the female body, while also serving as a reminder that life is measured, an ever-decreasing sum that cannot be escaped.

At the heart of Sterbak’s scrutiny is the struggle for freedom. Her frequent references to the body are intended to remind us that we inhabit a corporeal envelope that, regardless of our histories or actions, both conditions and limits our freedom. She also strategically addresses the political systems, power dynamics, and social norms that influence and control bodies and bodily experiences. Sterbak suggests that structures of confinement not only manifest via these external pressures, but also—possibly more crushingly—via their internalization, which impacts our sense of self and our relationships with others. These tensions are given physical form in work that literally contains the body or physically limits its movement. Sisyphus Sport (1997) and Sisyphus II (1991), as the titles clearly imply, reference the well-known Greek myth of Sisyphus and slyly reduce this tale to its essential thematic and material components. The weight, struggle, and futility of life are represented in a simple granite backpack and aluminum cage structure with a rounded bottom that makes balance impossible. The installation of the work includes a looping film depicting a man in this cage attempting to remain upright; his struggle to balance always fails, yet his need to succeed is endless. I Want You to Feel the Way I Do … (The Dress) (1984-85), evokes the damaging effects of love in the hands of characters who play out narratives of suffering and revenge. The work includes a text that reads like a poison letter which is made even more sinister by the outstretched arms of an ominous electrified dress seeking an embrace that, if given, will only cause more harm. The larger-thanlife- size mechanized crinoline in Remote Control II (1989), the male chest hair sewn into the transparent fabric of Distraction (1991) and Nightgown (Chemise de Nuit) (1993–2014) draw attention to social expectations with regard to appearance and behaviour, how policies and laws limit or control sexuality or gender expression, and remind us of the ways in which certain bodies continue to be privileged, marginalized, or controlled.

The bed is the one place that is inextricably connected to the cycle of life—it is the place of sleep, but also of birth, sex, sickness, and death. Bread Bed (1996-2025) highlights most precisely the ways in which Sterbak entwines the conventional with the visceral. The mattress is a single loaf of golden-brown bread, a gesture reminiscent of fairy tales or folklore. In this work, the common becomes extraordinary, not because the mattress has metamorphized into something more valuable like gold, but because its material replacement is equally as common. Sterbak’s substitutions are not magical transformations; they simply underline the absurdity of the ordinary. This bread bed is uncomfortable because we think about bread as something nourishing we consume and digest, not as something to receive and hold our bodies in all of their leaking, sweating, fetid states.

Sterbak celebrates the productive friction inherent in the tension of opposites. As she has stated,

“I think attraction/repulsion is inherent in the most successful works of art—if it’s all repulsion, nobody would engage with it; if it’s all happy and positive and attractive, it can easily fall into the realm of decoration or sentimentality. The push and pull recalls our daily existence. The great thing about an artwork is that one can present mutually exclusive propositions—not sequentially, but all at once.” 2.

Sterbak understands the human condition as an ongoing narrative of provocative contrasts: absurd and rational, flawed yet perfect, fragile but strong, and her material and thematic scope reflects this. The incongruous impulse to both resist and accept contradiction is itself a paradox, and it is in this place of struggle that Sterbak’s work is most at home.

– Naomi Potter, Curator/Director Esker Foundation.

1. Jana Sterbak and Lena Nievers, “On the Passage of Time: Jana Sterbak in Conversation with Lena Nievers,” in Jana Sterbak: Life-Size (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2017), 74.

2. Ibid. 77.