A new TWU alumni exhibition featuring artwork by Kristin Voth Davies, Kat Grabowski, Russell Leng and Sarah Wright is now showing at the SAMC Gallery (Norma Marion Alloway Library) on the TWU Langley campus. The collecting is showing October 14—November 14, 2021.
Thursday, October 14 was the opening reception for All who wander, a collaborative project featuring TWU alumni artists.
Russell Leng, alumnus and Instructor in Art + Design, says that his artwork series, which he calls “drawings of repair,” was not originally meant to be in a gallery.
Appearing crackled and sutured, Leng's work was first conceived of as an artist book, enabling viewers to engage in the process of tactile prayer by tracing the mended cracks. Presented at the SAMC Gallery, Leng's work is wheat-pasted to the wall, connecting it back to the gritty street aesthetic that provided the impetus for the project.
He reflects on the beauty of wandering as an open-ended adventure. "I like the word coddiwomple," he says. "(It means) traveling in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination."
"That can be terrifying but it can also open up ground for a lot of amazing things to happen," he said.
During the exhibition's opening reception, Leng and his fellow SAMC alumni Kristin Voth Davies, Kat Grabowski, and Sarah Wright each introduced their works and described their process of creating. They also answered questions from TWU art students and faculty, and provided practical tips and advice for many aspiring artists.
Kristin Voth Davies wanted to investigate what it looks like to make art compassionately, or as she describes, "to enter into a relationship with others through our artmaking." She pursues this, through a reflection on vulnerability.
Turning to her own personal history as subject matter, she ventured on a "psychological wandering," using childhood photo albums as source materials. She had always been interested in the role that photo albums play in shaping people's identities, and was particularly inspired by photos from previous decades that were unedited, which she found to be particularly revealing. "We looked at facial expressions... (where) there's no editing," she said. "We looked at dissonance and isolation, juxtaposed with community." Davies hopes that her images reflect the loneliness that is sometimes hidden within our album-ready images.
Kat Grabowski plays with staged narratives, depicting the interplay between femininity and nature. She considers themes like birthing, mother nature, and life cycles. "Even historically, nature has been associated with femininity," she observed. Grabowski seeks to answer questions like, 'What is femininity? What are its limitations, and how can we complicate our understanding of femininity?" Her work challenges viewers to reflect on femininity more deeply.
Artist Sarah Wright's work originated from the streets of her East Vancouver neighborhood. As she walked, she would gather discarded materials left behind by industry and her street entrenched neighbors. These remnants were woven into crude tapestries she titles "Carpets for a Wasteland." Through the act of weaving she brings an ethic of care and tenderness to these discarded materials. By combining these disparate shreds into new relationships in the form of weavings she asks “what it means to make, mend and share in a wasteland.”
See this story in the Aldergrove Star.
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