The opening reception for the exhibitions will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 18th at the gallery. The evening will begin with an artist talk at 6 p.m., offering the public an opportunity to learn more about the individual projects and the workshops that will be offered by the exhibiting artists.
The opening events are family friendly, free and open to the public. Everyone is welcome.
In the Window and South Contemporary Gallery, CVAG is presenting Farheen HaQ’s installation Being Home. In this new work the artist combines sculpture, photography and video to explore the psychic, spiritual and emotional territories within domestic spaces. Drawing on a history of feminist art practice that claims and makes space, HaQ uses household objects, images, actions and rituals to express the overlapping identities of motherhood, feminism, gender and ethnicity.
By documenting herself re-enacting familiar gestures drawn from childhood memories and current experiences of motherhood, the artist investigates how culture and memory live in our bodies. HaQ describes Being Home as a “vocabulary of gestures that make visible a lineage of women who have come before her: those who washed by hand, made rotis, ground up spices, swaddled, wrapped and comforted.”
Positing the dinner table, the laundry and the kitchen sink as significant sites where the diversity of daily life intersect, the artist asks questions about how identity is expressed through relationships to home spaces. “What is my body’s relationship to this site? “How does home live in my body?” “How am I present in my home?” “How am I home?”
Farheen HaQ has lived and worked in Victoria for the past seventeen years. She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally including New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. She holds a BA in International Development, a BEd and an MFA in Visual Arts.
HaQ also works as an art educator delivering professional development workshops. On October 3rd from 2-5 p.m., the artist will be co-facilitating “Making Motherhood,” an art-making workshop for mothers of all ages at the Comox Valley Art Gallery. Psychotherapist Rachel Maclaren will join HaQ as a co-facilitator to present the workshop, which invites participants to uncover the many faces of motherhood.
Being Home and Shelter, Cover, Claim are both part of CVAG’s exhibition series In This Body: Journeys in Places of Meeting. CVAG Curator Angela Somerset describes the projects as sharing an interest in “artistic research residing at the intersection of art and everyday life. The artists have an affinity for using themselves as the subject matter as part of their experiential investigations that result in diverse representations of a changing sense of self.”
In CVAG’s George Sawchuk Room, collaborative team Bronwen Payerle and Amelia Epp are showing their site responsive work Shelter, Cover, Claim. In this new body of work the artists use processes drawn from printmaking, bricolage, painting and sculpture to explore the widespread human impulse to create shelter. Payerle and Epp have been making art together over the past two years, sharing a curiosity and interest in natural and built environments. They describe their collaborative project as being focused on the “physical, emotional and aesthetic materiality of enclosures, the perceived protective quality of fabrics and environment-specific textures found within both built and natural spaces.”
North Island College Fine Art students will be showing a collection of sculptural objects in CVAG’s Community Space. Inspired by everyday objects that have been interpreted through traditional and alternative materials, the exhibition Translation proposes new ways of understanding our relationship with the things we create and encounter. Featured students include: Lisa Petrunia, Sarcy Geddes, Sarah Bergeron, Maddy Cornish, Chueh-Yu Chen, and Kiani Evans.
