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
Sweet Dreams
Tonya Corkey
Main Gallery
January 17th - March 21st
Running counter to the conventional preoccupation with loss of memory, Corkey proposes a meditation on the process and utility of forgetting. Through remembering, we reconsider and reshape memories. Even seemingly innocuous memories can torment when recalled excessively. What is not remembered, whether by choice or by circumstance, can be forgotten. Forgetting enables the mind to sift through what is valuable and what is not, to be rid of what harms, haunts, or otherwise clutters with no reason or lesson.
Tonya Corkey’s use of lint – a recurring material throughout her practice – finds renewed poetic relevance as a material embodiment of memory. Sourced from friends and family, lint carries within it a rich assortment of matter such as textile fibres, hair, dander (dead skin cells), pigments, and other dust particles resulting from human activity. Like soil, lint is an archival material; it indexes and documents one’s day-to-day material reality. As a working material, it possesses remarkable formal versatility which Corkey expertly showcases in this body of work through felting and experimental casting techniques.
Sweet Dreams, the eponymous installation at the centre of the exhibition presents an intimate nocturnal scene featuring a video projection at the head of a quilt-covered double bed. The stop-motion animation video reproduces the panels of the lint-felted quilt atop the bed, which trace the progress of a bat catching and eating moths. Here Corkey articulates memories as nocturnal creatures: flittering bats recall intrusive thoughts, late nights tormented by ruminations of a moment past, doom spiraling. By contrast, the richly-patterned moths embody the delicacy of nostalgic memories. Both bear the muted tones and fuzzy, indeterminate edges of fading memories. The setting of this drama is notable, with the bed being both a place of comfort and of immense vulnerability. Corkey hints at memory’s ability to reassess and adapt itself through recall.
Two Figures Hauling More Than They Can Carry (2022) references the Icelandic folktale of Reynisdrangar, a 216-foot cluster of rock pillars in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Reynisfjara beach. The story goes that these pillars were once trolls who, in an attempt to haul a three-mast ship ashore, were caught out at sea by dawn and instantly turned to stone. Corkey’s retelling, rendered in lint and Icelandic wool, features a series of human figures caught within the silhouette of the rock pillar. All figures are abstracted self-portraits, taken at night and in motion, with only the last figure stepping out of the rock formation. The work likens holding onto certain memories with hauling a cumbersome load and, like the original folktale, cautions against letting a fixation take precedence over survival.
Sweet Dreams features a range of formal interpretations of memory and forgetting, combining the formal versatility and symbolic weight of lint with the narrative whimsy of fables and folktales to deliver subtle and perceptive reflections on life.
–Liuba González de Armas
Meet the Artist
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Après le Bain
Riisa Gundesen
State of Flux Gallery
January 17th - March 21st
Après le Bain explores the performance of femininity in private spaces through an autobiographical lens, using self-portraiture and still life to recreate sensation-based narratives of gender expression, mental illness, and domesticity. The work documents periods of depression and turmoil, where the safety of the home interior takes on a sinister quality, filled with mess, discarded refuse, or rotting food. The abject is central, evoking visceral responses in viewers—tightening of the gorge, jarring in the gut—drawing them into intimate bodily experiences. Après le Bain focuses on the home bathroom, with cutout paintings draped three-dimensionally over walls and floors, where commercial wellness products act as signifiers of hyper-feminine performance. The material pleasure of figurative painting and colorful consumer objects is disrupted by the abject: menstrual blood, cluttered surfaces, and waxy, scratched textures suggest compulsive rituals, absent bodies, and bodily anxieties. Objects function as costumes in the arcane rituals of femininity, symbolizing collective concerns around desirability, aging, and mortality.
Meet the Artist
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Minobimaadisiiwin
ᒥᓄᐱᒫᑎᓰᐏᐣ
The Good Life in the Seven Grandfather Teachings
Erin Roundsky
Window Gallery
January 17th - March 21st
The Seven Grandfather Teachings — Honesty, Respect, Love, Humility, Truth, Wisdom, and Bravery — offer guidance on how to live in balance with oneself, others, and the natural world to achieve Minobimaadisiiwin, the good life. Rooted in the Anisininew worldview, these principles shape the foundation of this exhibition, which presents a series of seven hand-thrown vessels created during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, supported by
Canada Council for the Arts.
Each vessel embodies one of the teachings, serving as a tangible reminder of ways to live in a good way. Through textured surfaces of English, Anishininiimowin, and syllabics, the works bridge language, identity, and form. Techniques such as sgraffito, inlay, and slip are used to embed words, textures, and emotions into the clay, transforming each piece into both a vessel and a record of personal reflection.
The making process itself becomes a dialogue — between the artist, the earth, and the elements of fire and flame. Wheel throwing provides grounding and physical connection to the material, while the unpredictable nature of soda firing invites collaboration with natural forces that leave their own marks upon the surface.
In a time when disconnection feels pervasive, The Seven Grandfather Teachings offers a space to reflect on relationships with community, culture, and the land, and to remember the enduring relevance of traditional teachings in contemporary life.
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