In: mixed media
Tangible Stories | Leslie Love exhibition at The Old School House
September 27, 2023Tangible Stories | Leslie Love exhibition at The Old School House
I run a medium sized arts institution in a century old building, in the oldest postal code in Canada, in a sleepy town with one set of stoplights, where Leslie Weigand Love presents Tangible Stories, an exhibition that alchemizes grief.
With such a direct and forthright conversation about life, and all the characters that weave in and out of the artists narrative, Tangible Stories bring us a capacity to understand how we can move grief : that cheese-grater heart feeling – the learning of a self anew without that physical presence of one who has passed, by drawing close the echoes of community and intergenerationality. A show created in conjunction with her deceased father, Love shows us a knowing of proximity that moves beyond death while honouring mystical answers, and the work is a multilayer practice in salvaging of family objects, repositioning how we examine daily work, and reclaiming it with a fresh contemporary take on materiality.
The repeated sunflower theme throughout the exhibition, the artist’s sunny disposition, the acknowledgement that life is a circle with petals, not a half moon horizon. A full cycle of raising children as we are raising ourselves, and with the knowledge of family and what came before, using discarded old signs silkscreened by an uncle, as substrate for paintings based on her late fathers photographs.
Ripped up mechanical manuals become petals, paint made with metal fittings from his welding shop, a repurposed welding visor that contains images of his band, an inner/outer life many artists and creatives straddle. The work we do from our hearts welded to the work we do for a paycheck to feed and provide and clothe those we love.
Remnants of her family’s work jeans ripped and braided into a rug. The mythologies we ascribe to as families as we create from our familiar collective memory – what/how we remember as small eyes, looking up to characters and personalities our parents know. A troubled band mate asleep in the coat room after a big party, the first day of moving into a new home that directly echoes the age of Love’s child when she moved back to the property she grew up on- the exhibition unfolds in thematic ripples.
Gifting the viewer with a unique and familiar feeling, how perspective shifts with time and age and the acknowledgment of vulnerability, how the back of a van was used for childhood camping but also was housing a dream of touring with a band, imagery of her parents eyes directly across from a mirror that reflects the viewers own.
I suppose it all comes back to Love, how aptly named, to bring forth so much compassion of self, honour an alchemy of grief, to show us that we can process loss in the context of community and family. That the work of materiality and re-purposing vitality, allows objects to incarnate new meaning and purpose in a cohesive beautiful exhibition of work.
This exhibition runs until October 28th, 2023, and is viewable at The Old School House Arts Center, on the unceeded territories of the Qualicum First Nations.
https://www.theoldschoolhouse.org/2023-leslie-love
~ by Guest Curator Illana Hester
Snapshots – Emerging Artists in Waterloo
September 25, 2023This past summer, The COVERT Collective’s Waterloo contingent of curators (Mark Walton and Conan Stark) gathered a group of 3 young artists from Waterloo Region to put on an exhibition of their work. With assistance from The City of Waterloo and The Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, Snapshots was created from the combined works of Raha Rahman, Ernst, Rullmann and Daniel Burton, and hung at the city’s Visitor Information entre through the summer.
On Saturday September 23, 2023, the group’s work was shown in a large format video on the walls of The Clay and Glass Gallery in Uptown Waterloo, during the annual Lumen Festival. Over 40,000 were wandering through the streets that night… and this is what they saw…
Click HERE to see the video!
~ Mark Walton
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Megan Feniak | Listily Lean
March 28, 2022Megan Feniak | Listily Lean
Warm wood elements and ethereal, textured lines swirl around a white washed room, bathed in natural light. Megan Feniak’s show, Listily Lean, is simultaneously methodical and untethered: an open reflection on currents of desire in the context of religious experience.
The show’s title comes from a passage in a 14th century mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing: “lean listily to this meek stirring of love in thine heart, and follow thereafter.” The artist notes the discontinued use of the word, listing, and motions to define it by what it is not: the more commonly used term listless, having no energy or enthusiasm (Oxford Dictionary). She describes leaning listily as “to chase, or to follow with an eagerness- an insatiable craving” a craving that is distinct from the negative connotations associated with the word lust. And it is so, the work is not a passive series of pieces but acts in unison, as one figurative brush stroke that embodies action, momentum, a burst of motion toward and in pursuit. Of what exactly? Only the artist knows.
Influenced by the works of Christian mystics, Feniak describes the research leading up to her show as circling around Anne Carson’s text, Eros the Bittersweet. This helped frame Feniak’s own work around eros as both pleasure and pain and to also speak to lack. Feniak describes the paradox of desire as “sustained only as long as the desired is out of reach. Absence is the surprising factor in the equation of desire” and quotes Carson in saying, “for (their) delight is in reaching; to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight” (Eros the Bittersweet 69).
According to Feniak, it is this act of reaching for something perfect that is both the joy and the confounding dilemma of mystics. In her work, she listily leans to understand; hungrily, painfully yearns to both capture and test the limits of human desire.
To stretch the title even further, the pieces also appear to have a desired lean, pared down feel to them, while their earnest presence marks the space with an overwhelming sense of profundity and wistfulness. The eagerness and motion indicated by the title is captivated by the fragments of wood carvings and sculpture, dispersed throughout the room and woven together by the strokes of fluidity marked by the lighter, wispy elements of show. The intensities of desire and delight are stitched by the deeply spiritual threads of mysticism and relish in a dreamlike experience beyond the daily and mundane.
In describing the show, I apply the artist’s own method of distilling “listily”– by describing what it is not. It is not loud nor sanctimonious, but it is not quiet. It is not self-congratulatory and yet it is not meek. It is not frozen in one specific time or place, but feels as though it is part of a continuum, both for the artist but also for a more universal theme of human relation to divine exploration. In the same way that spiritual practice shatters human perception and notions of boundary, Listily Lean creates a bodily intimacy with the abstract and leaves us craving for more.
Megan Feniak received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2018, and MFA from the University of Guelph in 2021. Working in sculpture and woodcarving, her sculptures intimate the power of affects, gestures, and the positioning of the body in ritual and belief.
Website: http://www.meganfeniak.com
Instagram: @fenny__.__
~ Paulette Cameron
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Ana Žanić – One Breath – Femme Folks Fest Repost
March 15, 2022The first time you see Ana Žanić’s watercolor and pencil artwork is like taking a sharp blow to the limbic system. Every one of your senses screams “I know this” but cannot figure out what “this” is or why it knows it. They take on the form of something both organic and subliminal, communicating to us of the past (back to pre-history) and our deeply troubled emotional state we find ourselves in through the pandemic.
Her colour palettes are very natural and gently reassuring… mother earth will take us back into her bosom and help us heal. The meticulous marks speak of long journeys past, and reach out to our future selves to remind us that we have struggled before and have overcome those obstacles… we can do it again.
I reached out to Ana and asked her a few questions.
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Ana Žanić – One Breath
May 19, 2021The first time you see Ana Žanić’s watercolor and pencil artwork is like taking a sharp blow to the limbic system. Every one of your senses screams “I know this” but cannot figure out what “this” is or why it knows it. They take on the form of something both organic and subliminal, communicating to us of the past (back to pre-history) and our deeply troubled emotional state we find ourselves in through the pandemic.
Her colour palettes are very natural and gently reassuring… mother earth will take us back into her bosom and help us heal. The meticulous marks speak of long journeys past, and reach out to our future selves to remind us that we have struggled before and have overcome those obstacles… we can do it again.
I reached out to Ana and asked her a few questions.
Read More
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