Main Gallery
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Marlene Hilton Moore
Jill Price |
Patterned, beaded, stitched, appliqued, crocheted, and knitted, LUSH is a two-person exhibition investigating the social, cultural, and ecological implications of textiles from different perspectives.
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Left: Marlene Hilton Moore, Paeonia Beauty, photo, 37” x 30”
Right: Jill Price, Regally Blind, 2020, Reclaimed yarn and figurines, 3” x 4” x 10” each (Photos provided by artists) |
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A feast for the eyes from multiple vantage points, Marlene Hilton Moore’s photographic work, combined with sculpture, architecture, and artifacts, develops narratives based upon a woman, a dress, and a place. Visually weaving together encoded cultural messages that allude to personal social histories, Marlene brings together two series of work to create a continuum of her investigation into identify formation. Juxtaposing a pure white mannequin wearing an intensely embroidered dress with richly textured objects and a vivid historic interior from her body of work entitled Inside My Skin, Hilton Moore’s gallery installation is paired with photographs of Peonia Beauty, a series of images that reveal a dress of black taffeta peonies, a quixotic young woman, and textures of deteriorating architecture. While moving in and out of Marlene’s photos into the physical realm of the artist’s carefully hand-crafted objects and attire, Hilton Moore’s quotidian reality expands into a dance of authenticity and vision. Hilton Moore shares, “The woman forms an intimate bond with her place and a visual story emerges. Fleeting glances, a pointed gaze and body language all reveal a distinctive identity. Accidental elements of light and motion also create unique moments that add to the resonance of each photograph.”
Across the room from Hilton Moore’s arrangement of sculptures and photos is a grouping of entanglements by Jill Price. Both absurd and playful, Price’s altered ready-mades, created from reclaimed yarn and porcelain figurines, point more to how materials in their various forms have a way of controlling, consuming, commodifying, and curating bodies in and out of cultural norms. Often covering much of the figurine’s white surfaces and heads that carry forward Euro-centric and patriarchal notions of femininity, beauty, etiquette and class, Price reconstructs found textiles into large assemblages of fibre to point to how we can’t see the messiness of all of that which is produced or attached to that which we consume. Price admits, “I have grown up deeply influenced by design and fashion. Now astutely aware of the social and ecological shadows attached to global chains of extraction, production, dissemination and discard, my entanglements of material excess and waste offer me a way to still create while partially unmaking myself from further consumption amidst ecological crisis.
Marlene Hilton Moore’s artwork engages the identity of the female through sculpture, audiovisual installations, and photography. Extensively exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions across Ontario, Quebec, and the East Coast, Marlene has also been awarded many Public Art Commissions over the last twenty years. Her distinctive profile in Canadian visual arts is marked by outstanding achievements at local and national levels, particularly in the complex arena of Public Art and Monuments. Also, an educator, Marlene retired from her professorship at Georgian College’s School of Design and Visual Arts following a distinguished 25-year teaching career.
Jill Price is a Canadian artist grateful to be living on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples in Barrie, Ontario. Price achieved her BFA and B.Ed. at the University of Western Ontario and received SSHRC research fellowships for her OCADU MFA thesis Land as Archive: A Collection of Seen & Unseen Shadows. Also receiving a SSHRC research fellowship for a research-creation PhD at Queen’s University, Price’s research into unmaking as a conceptual and physical act can also be viewed in UNFURLED: Unsettling the Archive from a More-Than-Human Perspective, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Orillia Art and Historical Museum.
Across the room from Hilton Moore’s arrangement of sculptures and photos is a grouping of entanglements by Jill Price. Both absurd and playful, Price’s altered ready-mades, created from reclaimed yarn and porcelain figurines, point more to how materials in their various forms have a way of controlling, consuming, commodifying, and curating bodies in and out of cultural norms. Often covering much of the figurine’s white surfaces and heads that carry forward Euro-centric and patriarchal notions of femininity, beauty, etiquette and class, Price reconstructs found textiles into large assemblages of fibre to point to how we can’t see the messiness of all of that which is produced or attached to that which we consume. Price admits, “I have grown up deeply influenced by design and fashion. Now astutely aware of the social and ecological shadows attached to global chains of extraction, production, dissemination and discard, my entanglements of material excess and waste offer me a way to still create while partially unmaking myself from further consumption amidst ecological crisis.
Marlene Hilton Moore’s artwork engages the identity of the female through sculpture, audiovisual installations, and photography. Extensively exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions across Ontario, Quebec, and the East Coast, Marlene has also been awarded many Public Art Commissions over the last twenty years. Her distinctive profile in Canadian visual arts is marked by outstanding achievements at local and national levels, particularly in the complex arena of Public Art and Monuments. Also, an educator, Marlene retired from her professorship at Georgian College’s School of Design and Visual Arts following a distinguished 25-year teaching career.
Jill Price is a Canadian artist grateful to be living on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples in Barrie, Ontario. Price achieved her BFA and B.Ed. at the University of Western Ontario and received SSHRC research fellowships for her OCADU MFA thesis Land as Archive: A Collection of Seen & Unseen Shadows. Also receiving a SSHRC research fellowship for a research-creation PhD at Queen’s University, Price’s research into unmaking as a conceptual and physical act can also be viewed in UNFURLED: Unsettling the Archive from a More-Than-Human Perspective, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Orillia Art and Historical Museum.
470 Days |
The Project Gallery
Regina Williams |
Left: Regina Williams, Postcard Grouping, 2020-21, Mixed Media, Variable
Right: Regina Williams, Waiting, 2020, Clay, wood and fabric, Variable (Photos by Frances Thomas) |
At the beginning of the Covid-19 shutdown, Regina Williams began a series of small collage and sculptural work. Getting lost in memory and speculation, Williams collages served as a cut and paste journey across time that became nostalgic as each fragment offered meaning and a mode of preservation. Williams confesses, “Isolation offered me the opportunity to explore, enjoy and reuse mountains of material that I have had stored for decades. Old postcards, stamps and photographs offered visual and written entry points into my ancestry.” Paired with another exploration into clay, Williams arrived at an abundance of quirky little figurines inspired by Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Each about the size of a human hand, Williams caringly let these little people inhabit her days. Standing together and yet excruciatingly alone, each one appears to be looking up, down, backwards and or forwards; searching.
Regina Williams is a Fine Arts honours graduate from Georgian College. Primarily a painter, Williams was the 2001 winner of the RBC Private Counsel New Canadian Painting Award and in 2012 participated in a one-month residency at Foundation Valparaiso in Spain. Having also explored other media throughout her professional career, Williams has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions. William’s work can be found in many private collections across North America and the collections of the MacLaren Art Centre, RBC, and Scotia McLeod Inc. Williams is represented by Roberts Gallery in Toronto. |