Getting ready to install this exhibition! I want to thank Lauren McKinley-Renzetti for curating the project for Neighbourhood Gallery, and for welcoming me into her community place. This project feels like a project inside a project. It's an offshoot of my larger research-creation doctorate work called MUSEUM IN WATER. Since my residency in Mexico this past spring, I have been excited and attracted to the beautiful flowers all around me and the metaphors they illicit about relational connections, growth, and creativity of the artists/co-workers that I have/had the immense pleasure connecting with formally for my research over the past few months. This is a project that's a big thank you to them, and that keeps growing, keeps me grounded, makes me happy. This is my artist statement below.
While on an artist-residency in Puebla, Mexico this spring, I was drawn to the flowers in the studio’s garden. I photographed a Flor de Majo up close, printed it, and by intervening the image with found threads, I had produced my first in a series of works that I call Kissing the Bouquet. I have since photographed hundreds of flowers on my neighbourhood walks, slipping into my neighbours’ gardens enjoying their potency; lush petals and colours. Each work is called Flower, distinguished by their number on a list that keeps count of the expanding bouquet. The title comes from a passage I read in Elvia Wilk’s book, Death By Landscape (2022), where she talks about Medieval mystical manuscripts. She writes, “Christ’s side wound is sometimes depicted as a separate body part, a (very vaginal) opening into the page, for readers to peer into or imagine entering… for the devout to fondle and kiss.”
I would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario. Thanks too to Dimitri Levanoff Imagefoundry for sweet printing and printing advice, and Claire Greenshaw for introducing me to Wilk. And thank you artist friends!
SAVE THE DATE: Come see the show Sunday, November 16, noon over bubbly water!
