Sydney Hermant

Aunt Maud is a tertiary character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire, described as a mediocre painter and scrapbook artist. Sydney Hermant, a young Vancouver-based artist, writer, and curator whose work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and in Tokyo, brings Maud new life by materializing her scrapbook in the form of a cutting-edge artist's book. The contents of its pages are guided by the novel's narrative, by historical events that occurred during its writing, and by concurrent ones from Nabokov's own biography--its fractured reimagining of Maud's life winds through the Luddite rebellion, oil crises in the Middle East and a full-on merman formal ball.