May 14th-20th
Opening: May 14th 7-11pm
Ten emerging artists from the OCAD University Sculpture and Installation program explore how presence and absence is contained in sculptural form. How can an object show evidence of life? What remains after the piece is inhabited? At times this theme is approached though objects shaped to fit human skin and at others through the bodies that are different from, yet parallel, to our own.
Shannon Doyle, Alex Beriault and Stephanie Flowers address the body on different terms. Doyle maps and merges two figures with steel bars, conveying both strength and vulnerability. She seamlessly combines abstraction and figuration. Beriault’s structure contains and divides an absent body. She references the magician and the filmstrip while keeping a sense of confrontation close at hand. Flowers disrupts the classical female nude with an incision that does not reveal an interior. The museum like display has the nude both transfixed and writhing.
Kayla Butt both constrains and nurtures grass inside fifty inhospitable mass-produced thimbles. Thimbles are both industrial and domestic and Butt adds further dimensions to this object by incorporating natural elements. Jessica Mifsud similarly creates unlikely conjunctions. Her hairy installation shakes gender codes by transforming a domestic icon into a wild creature. Ian Norton furthers this conversation with his integration of knitted wool and machined parts. His piece is in motion; cycling like a conveyer belt, it is functional without a clear purpose.
Maria Cupani shakes the signifiers of authority with a humorous take on the bronze bust. Ali Short continues an intuitive practice with her cornered yet flexible Casings. Subtly referencing classic male and female pairings Short ruminates on the connection between forming an identity and becoming anonymous. Sexual undertones set off Jeff Devine’s work where bulbous smoke pours from a pipe. The question here is not so much what a pipe is, but what it can be used for. Charlotte Stewardson’s casts of piled clothing preserves the unexpected aesthetic appeal of these everyday ephemeral forms. Her casts retain the spirit of things forgotten.
Finally, Nick Crombach and Megan Sproule present creatures of very different sorts. While Sproule’s mysterious and magical forms glow inside a glass jar, Crombach’s whale floats between steel and flesh, hunter and hunted.