"I didn't want the paper to be something that held the image. I wanted the paper to become the image. And again, it was this tension between still wanting this to have the quality of print or that it could exist in multiples, that it's not a sculpture, that it is very much paper, and it also is, in a way, a pattern or something that can refer to something in the future."
– Janice Kerbel
Janice Kerbel (b. 1969, Toronto, Canada, based in London, United Kingdom) creates narratives that explore the realisation of ‘impossible’ events and encounters. Her works pare down the language of her subject matters, which builds a deeper engagement with the viewer’s senses and imagination. Positioned between fact and fiction, they communicate an underlying sense of futility and longing.
Kerbel’s approach involves extensive research into diverse topics such as botany, crime, theatre, architecture and sports. It results in printed matter, performances and installations that are often deceptively simple in presentation. The Bird Island Project (2000–2002) depicts a fictitious yet geologically and ecologically plausible island in the Caribbean primed for tourist development. It comprises promotional media that meticulously describes features of the island, as well as audio files of indigenous flora and fauna completely invented by the artist. In the sound work Ballgame (Innings 1–3) (2009), Kerbel rigorously studied the language of baseball commentary to create a script for a voice actor that recounts a ‘perfectly average game’, with its quantitative averages precisely derived from statistics of historical games. Her well-known Score (2015–ongoing) series graphically scores music and movement with typography, appearing to document and instruct at the same time. For example, Score (Slip) (2013) is a typographic print that comedically notates the trajectory of a body as it slips on a banana peel, creating an upward curve captured in space and time.
Kerbel obtained her BFA from Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver in 1994 and her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1996. Notable solo exhibitions include Speech! Fight! (2023), part of Ora et lege II, National Gallery Prague; Fight (2019), Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre; Slip (2017), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Doug (2017), Serralves, Porto; Doug (2016), Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Doug (2015), Tramway, Glasgow; Kill The Workers! (2011), Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Nick Silver Can’t Sleep (2007), Tate Britain, London; The 1st at Moderna (2006), Moderna Musset, Stockholm; and Home Climate Gardens (2003), Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including the 8th Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (2018); Beautiful world, where are you? (2018), 10th Liverpool Biennial; Le Grand Balcon (2016), 9th La Biennale de Montréal; and Crack the Sky (2007), 5th La Biennale de Montréal.
Kerbel had her residency at the STPI Workshop in 2019, resulting in the exhibition New Releases, Old Friends (2025) with artists Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Tobias Rehberger and Pae White.