Post-Mortem Survey for Making Art Work 2020-21
Thank you for participating in the Making Art Work professional development workshop series co-presented by Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Union Gallery, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre. We are looking for feedback from participants of the program to inform future professional development programs. The survey should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. Your answers will be anonymous. Thank you for your time!
Current Exhibitions
Dans l’ombre du soleil /In the shadow of the sun
Alyssa Scott
Main Gallery
September 14th - November 9th
The exhibition Dans l’ombre du soleil / In the shadow of the sun is a printmaking sculpture installation that evokes images of home exploring the space between the family farm and the contradictions inherent to living on the land and transforming nature in order to do so. This exhibition explores the permeable boundaries of rural structures, to consider how both forces of nature and our impact on it, affect each other and intertwine, in both constructive and renewing, and deconstructive and decaying ways.
This installation reflects on shelter as a vacillating and fragile space and navigates making home in a world of crashing ecosystems. While the structures that we inhabit are necessary for survival, they are a smaller echo of the earth: a delicate boundary which is also necessary for our survival. Dans l’ombre du soleil / In the shadow of the sun reflects on our interdependence with shelter and nature, to explore emergent possibilities of a co-existing future among wild and inhabited environments.
A Common Babble
naakita f.k.
State of Flux Gallery
September 14th - November 9th
Speech is one method of crossing the loaded air between beings. It offers a path to find each other. Our sound, sure enough of its mark of distinction, carries for want of something shared; to vocalize always betrays a desire to collide with everything else. How might we assume less of language, and orient ourselves toward sound and song?
A Common Babble is an experiment with birdsong and speaking with birds. Birds have long been a figure in art and science, appearing as both inspirational and sacrificial objects of inquiry: birds being tracked and caged, their sounds recorded and played, put into roles innocent, poetic, cruel, and, debatably, necessary. The effort to study and document ourselves with birds must not reduce the relationship to human aesthetics, however—it is not just our histories and disciplines that connect us to birds. Beneath the structures developed to understand humans as a species, we share a process for making meaning out of the world through aural repetition. This thread of biological coding tying us to birds also makes them into urgent co-conspirators, where speech might become an expression of a will to breathe and live together. The singers who lend their voices to the work are treading the shared code, playing on it. There is an instinct to teach, mimic, adapt, and build a sensibility of sound that can be seen across human and bird communication. We can hear our relations. That sensibility is what structures the work of composing with birdsong, which considers more-than-human sounds as already being in concert with our own.
Art Work Care Work: Portraits of Artists / (M)others
Claire Drummond
Window Gallery
September 14th - November 9th
Art Work Care Work: Portraits of Artist/M(others) presents an ongoing series of large-scale oil paintings of those navigating what it means to be both an artist and a m(other) as a protest against the long-held idea in the art world that one cannot be both. This worn-out notion that stubbornly persists in our contemporary moment. M(others) in this work encompass the “other” and are defined according to writer Dani McClain’s conception of motherhood as including grandmothers, aunts, sisters, fathers, community members, queer and gender non-confirming people who see themselves engaged in “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.” Art Work Care Work depicts the daily lives of artist/m(others) to render visible the challenges of making creative work while m(othering), while also meditating on the ways in which the cohabitation of art and care work can create space for a more communal vision of human subjectivity.
How can the conditions of maternal creativity begin to undo traditional conceptions of the artist as a solitary individual locked away in their studio, moving towards a more collaborative and caring vision of what it means to be an artist – of what it means to be human? In a moment of ongoing subjective and ecological crisis, the intersection of art work and care work is crucial, as the essential work of mothering teaches us what it means to sustain life amidst uncertain futures while visual art allows us to imagine what gentler futures might look like.
