commissaire : Nicole Dawkins
26 au 30 août | August 26 to 30
vernissage 26 août 19h00 | August 26 ~ 7:00PM
studiobeluga.ca
VANESSA YANOW
MEICHEN WAXER
AMANDA MCCAVOUR - CARL STEWART - JENNIFER SMITH-WINDSOR - LIZZ ASTON - MEGARRAH BUXTON - SAMANTHA PURDY - SARAH GOTOWKA - SUZEN GREEN - TARA BURSEY - THEA HAINES
For contemporary artists working with textiles, the material and creative legacies that haunt these works are often downplayed or positioned discursively as ruptures from or subversions of tradition (“This ain’t your granny’s…”). Drawing from the broader original meaning of the loom as any implement or tool, HEIR/LOOMS is interested in the more complex and ambivalent relations that makers have with the (handmade) objects and labours that they have come to inherit.
The 12 artists included in the exhibit engage in distinct ways with the notion of “heirloom”— emulating or appropriating specific linguistic and creative traditions; revisiting nostalgic signifiers of family and home; incorporating hand-me-down and discarded materials; and collaborating on and with things left behind by mothers, grandparents, and anonymous strangers.
Amanda McCavour’s Stand in for Home, for example, is a life-size thread rendering of the kitchen in her previous home— a trace of domestic space as it is remembered. Machine sewn onto water soluble fabric which is later dissolved leaving only the thread behind, the re-imagined kitchen seems on the verge of unravelling; a reflection of the transience and fragility of the things, spaces, and memories that constitute what we call “home”.
In contrast, with her Collaborating with Her Story (Incarnations II and III), Vanessa Yanow salvages unfinished textile-based hobby projects and attempts to distil the personality imprinted on these incomplete objects. Guided by the hidden histories, anonymous women and creative labours encoded in these abandoned crafts, Yanow transforms them into finished fibre and glass assemblages.
How is it that some mundane objects take on the status of iconic or treasured artifacts, while other are left abandoned and forgotten? How do the things we make, like those which we inherit, become vestiges of our past, our home, and our heritage? Disrupting the boundaries between hobby craft and art object, past and present, “traditional” and “contemporary”, the fibre-based works included in HEIR/LOOMS explore how we use objects to remember, preserve and construct the past as well as frame ourselves for future remembrance.
I'm really looking forward to this show -- especially the performance art at the opening!
Rédigé par : Svea Vikander | 20/08/2011 à 12:30