Come experience All who wander, a TWU alumni exhibition featuring artwork by Kristin Voth Davies, Kat Grabowski, Russell Leng and Sarah Wright. Showing at the SAMC Gallery (Norma Marion Alloway Library) on the TWU Langley campus, October 14—November 14, 2021.
Register to attend the Opening Reception on October 14, 2021, 7pm on Eventbrite
About the exhibit | Words by Alysha Creighton, SAMC Sessional Assistant Professor of Art + Design
“Not all who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of The Ring
From the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness to Jesus' temptation in the desert, from the road to Emmaus to the ensuing centuries of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy sites, the act of wandering in the Judeo-Christian tradition is deeply invested with spiritual significance. Trinity Western University alumni artists featured in this exhibition take wandering as subject matter and methodology for their work. Wandering, for these artists, makes space for a unique quality of attention. A space of both being and becoming which opens one to new, redemptive possibilities.
As artist Sarah Wright walks the streets of her East Vancouver neighborhood she gathers discarded materials left behind by industry and her street entrenched neighbors. These remnants are 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.”
Similarly, Russell Leng’s attention to the banal and overlooked elements of our built environment springs from the act of walking the city. Leng’s colourful images take mended road cracks, what he refers to as “drawings of repair,” as source material for a visual meditation on brokenness and healing. This work was originally conceived of as an artist book, enabling viewers to engage in the process of tactile prayer by tracing the mended cracks. The work is presented here, wheat-pasted to the wall, connecting it back to the gritty street aesthetic that provided the impetus for the project.
Kat Grabowski and Kristen Voth Davies take wandering as the subject matter of their respective series’ of photographs and paintings. Grabowski’s staged analog photographs depict female bodies wandering in landscapes. Making reference to Romantic landscape paintings and the aesthetics of fashion photography, her photographs challenge the male gaze often implied in these imaging traditions. In the context of religious ideologies, purity culture, and patriarchy she seeks to carve out a space to render the “complexities of the female soul which are too often suppressed in mainstream [...] representation.”
Kristin Voth Davies' paintings situate her childhood figures in landscapes, but unlike Grabowski these are landscapes of imagination and memory. Drawing on her family’s archive, what Susan Sontag refers to as “a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connection,” Voth’s paintings map both connection and implied distance. The ambiguous, abstract grounds of her paintings articulate distance foregrounding the contemporary city dweller’s experience of “dissonance between sharing space and sharing communion.” The works gathered in this exhibition reveal wandering as a generative and redemptive act. The bodily and situated act of wandering resists prevailing cultural narratives that value journeys in terms of speed and efficiency rather than by the quality of redemptive attention to the world around us.
Artist Bios
Sarah Wright is an interdisciplinary artist who combines drawing, found object and written word to explore the daily absurdities we encounter. Born and raised on the traditional territories of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Lunaapeewak peoples, Sarah is grateful to reside as an uninvited guest in the unceded and ancestral home territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh people. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, with a focus on critical theory and cultural practices.
Kat Grabowski’s photo-based practice is informed by her personal experience with organized religion and conditioned ideologies. Utilizing a multiplicity of photography formats, she aims to explore her position as a female photographer who contributes to the consumption of women’s images while also undermining and complicating standardized and stereotypical versions of the female narrative. Kat recently earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2020) and has a BA in visual arts and design from Trinity Western University (2012).
Kat also runs a freelance photography and graphic design business named Art + The Aerialist which specializes in wedding documentation and design support for small businesses.
Kristin Voth Davies is a Vancouver-based artist who grew up in the Fraser Valley. She gravitates towards the ordinary, small things that are often overlooked. Some themes addressed by her work include the urban landscape, childhood, alienation, and promise. She works primarily in painting and drawing, with an emerging interest in printmaking and exploring new ways to draw. Outside of the studio Kristin cares for her young daughter and teaches art to children. Kristin’s work is deeply informed by her study of English literature and theology. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Trinity Western University and a Master of Arts in theology and the arts from Regent College.
Russell Leng is an artist and educator living, making, and working on the traditional ancestral unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. He completed a B.A. in Art from TWU in 2009, and an M.F.A. in Contemporary Art Practice from University of Edinburgh in 2013. Since graduating from TWU, his work has been collected and exhibited at galleries worldwide including Beers.Lambert (London), FFDG (San Francisco), Hungryman Gallery (San Francisco and Chicago), Fleming Collection (London), Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh), Parts Gallery (Toronto), and FIELD Contemporary (Vancouver).
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About Trinity Western University
Founded in 1962, Trinity Western University is Canada’s premier Christian liberal arts university dedicated to equipping students to establish meaningful connections between career, life, and the needs of the world. It is a fully accredited research institution offering liberal arts and sciences, as well as professional schools in business, nursing, education, human kinetics, graduate studies, and arts, media, and culture. It has four campuses and locations: Langley, Richmond-Lansdowne, Richmond-Minoru, and Ottawa. TWU emphasizes academic excellence, research, and student engagement in a vital faith community committed to forming leaders to have a transformational impact on culture. Learn more at www.twu.ca or follow us on Twitter @TrinityWestern, on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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