Undone | Owens Art Gallery | Sackville, NB | October 8 to December 11, 2022
Undone
Curated by Emily Falvey
This group exhibition features seven artists whose work both centres and expands our understanding of the handmade and its relevance to contemporary art. It is also a meditation on our shared and personal circumstances during a period of multiple crises, as well as our capacity to imagine a better future. Building on the various meanings of “undone,” the exhibition makes connections between artistic process, grief, impermanence, transition, undoing, not doing, and doing differently.
Artistic partners Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter explore the space between care and resistance, material and immaterial, and sound amplification and dampening. Combining textiles, video, performative gestures, and found objects, their installations present moments of balance and incongruity in which sound takes shape as a quilt pattern and the body dematerializes into video signals. In her series Stacks, artist Tara K. Wells uses layers of fabric strips ripped in preparation for quilting to create sculptures whose strata recall the natural patterns of sedimentation, eddying waters, and atmospheric effects. As the fabric strips may still be used to make quilts, the sculptures exist as a kind of “holding pattern” in which preparation and recycling become ends in themselves.
Andrea Mortson’s fantastical collages reconfigure vintage children’s books and other printed matter into eerie meditations on artistic self-reference and doubling. At once quaint and sinister, the enigmatic atmosphere of these carefully assembled compositions recalls classic fairy tales in which images come alive and the living become ghosts. Roula Partheniou also explores the ambiguities of representation, but from a more conceptual angle. In her recent body of work, Stationery Objects, she reinterprets the category of still life through meticulous, handmade replicas of office supplies. These incredible, trompe-l’oeil facsimiles of post-it notes, tape, and labels pay homage to the aesthetics of productivity while also playfully sabotaging it.
Erika DeFreitas takes the practice of copying and turns it towards grief. In her ongoing series, so buried in it that we only see them when pulled out in abstractions, human bodies shrouded in blankets or tarps are sourced from newspaper crime scenes, then isolated and embroidered on cotton. In the hours spent embroidering these works, DeFreitas thinks “about the fallen, the circumstances, the location, those who work ‘around’ the body, and those left to mourn.” Ursula Johnson also engages with practices of copying and repetition in her O’pltek series, which questions colonial ideals of authenticity through a reinterpretation of traditional Mi’kmaq basketry. In Mi’kmaq, the word “o’pltek” means “it’s not right,” a turn of phrase that describes both the baskets’ unusual, non-functional forms, as well as the way they “speak back” to oppressive Euro-American histories and archival practices that seek to dominate others and foreclose their future.