Royale Projects is pleased to present Balancing Act, an installation by artist duo Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins opening Saturday, April 20 from 12- 5pm and running through May 18, 2024.  

Balancing Act features paintings of imagined sculptural forms. Equal parts ironic and uncanny, their unusual sense of presence is heightened by the artists’ use of contrasting light sources, shadows, brightly saturated hues, as well as both two point and parallel perspectives. These speculative compositions reference geometric abstraction and surrealism.

At the center of this installation is a claw machine based on the classic arcade game. Visitors  are invited to play the larger-than-life machine, using a joystick to direct a crane to pick up and rearrange geometric shapes into balanced compositions. Crafted by hand and covered  in wool felt, these sculptural forms consist of a variety of shapes and colorful hues.  They are stackable and endlessly reconfigurable. 

“The paintings are like the dance steps that come with a dance album, or an architectural rendering before the building is built. They’re akin to: let’s make a rendering that is so idealized, so cinematic in light and shadow, that has such saturation from its surroundings, that it is a little bit tragic and highly idealized, in precarious balance. Can they compete with the sculpture? And vice versa” says Borins.

Balancing Act continues Marman and Borins’ longstanding interest in critiquing Modernism, referring to and reassessing 20th-century art history: its utopias, polemics, and formal one-upmanship. With  its reliance on audience participation, Balancing Act questions the myth of originality. The  project also stems from their practice of minimizing evidence of the artist’s  hand, while producing works that contrast with beguiling familiarity and yet machine-like  precision. 

Balancing Act premiered at New York’s Cristin Tierney Gallery and is part of a larger exhibition,  Three Dimensions, that was envisioned and built specifically for Contemporary Calgary’s Flanagan Family Gallery, Calgary, AB. The exhibition tours KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY in the summer of 2024 and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, NS in the fall of 2024.  

Jennifer Marman is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. Daniel Borins is a graduate  of McGill University. Marman and Borins both graduated from the Ontario College of Art and  Design, where they started their collaboration. Their work  is in the permanent collections  of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton,  the University of Toronto, York University, and the City of Toronto.