Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9, 6-9pm
Show Runs: November 9 - January 6
Location: Studio Sixty Six, 858 Bank Street unit 101
Please join us for the opening reception of Warp.
WARP, an exhibition featuring local emerging artist Gabriela Avila-Yiptong and Montréal-based fibre artist Allyson Rousseau, blurs the line between traditional notions of craft and fine art through a dialogue between weaving and painting. The exhibition emphasizes the material differences between fibre and paints while intertwining the two mediums through studies of colour and texture, installation, and still-life imagery; accentuating similarities between the two, both within and outside of convention.
Avila-Yiptong’s work for this exhibition is a direct response to Rousseau’s weavings and plays with the idea of a classic still-life to question where weavings stand alongside contemporary painting. Some of her pieces such as the Still(s) depict still lifes of hung art objects, such as weavings and paintings, in order to question when the classification of an object is that of art or craft. Her flat colour study works, such as Colour Study I, directly refer to the composition and the aesthetic created in Rousseau’s Gradient Study 2 x 9, further exploring this question.
Rousseau’s exploration of blending colour through weaving echoes the abstract colour field works of Rothko, establishing her medium as one to be recognized as a form of contemporary art. She is inspired by the graphic sensibilities of modern and abstract painting techniques and aims to disguise her medium in plain sight by weaving with colour and texture, as one might treat the same elements in a painting.
In weaving, the “warp” and “weft” behave the same as the x and y-axis of a grid in painting, creating a base structure from which a weaving or painting is built upon. This is parallel to an informal set of rules that both artists’ work share, such as; hanging works on a wall, manipulating visual perspective, and applying colour theory. While Rousseau’s work explores the depth of field from an outside perspective, Avila-Yiptong’s work explores the same from within, at times inverting what the viewer would normally expect to see off of the canvas.
Much like how the word implies, Warp aims to challenge and distort the perspective of the viewer through the display of works that employ gradation techniques, and visual points of tension in order to transcend elements such as time, light, form, space and ultimately each artists’ medium and practice.
Allyson Rousseau, Gradient Study 2 x 9
