Karen Pick holds a BFA in visual arts from Université Laval (1988) and produces installations in which she takes iconographic motifs from the vanitas pictorial tradition of the sixteenth century and introduces her own symbolic vocabulary. Her three-dimensional natures mortes, which include drawings, feature bones and flowers in addition to human organs (hand, heart, eye) and geographic maps. All of these elements evoke the fleeting nature of existence, yet from a positive angle, hence the artist’s use of the term memento vitae to describe her assemblages. Vanitas (1996) is the major work that inspired this course of reflection.
PICK, Karen (1955)
