…showcases the work of MAWA’s 2019-2020 Foundation Mentorship Program mentees. Our cohort was formed in September 2019. The first half of the program allowed us to get to know each other in person; during the second half, the group structure shifted in parallel to the pandemic where no contact meetings ensued. The emotional and social changes felt across the world over the past year have served as inspiration for this exhibition. The work explores the complexities and dualities of the relationships that structure life and influence day to day living. As artists, each of us has taken a critical look at the structure and nature of relationships and how they fit into the self-defined We, Myself, and Us.
January 8-30th 2021 at MAWA 611 Main Street and online at wemyselfandus.com
Kristina Blackwood, Barb Bottle, Laura E Darnbrough, Monique Fillion, Jessie Jannuska, Jocelyne Le Leannec, Nichol Marsch, Allison Stevens
Special thanks to Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and the Foundation Mentorship Program, as well as Mentors Jenny Western, Sarah Crawley, Lisa Wood, Yvette Cenerini, and Leslie Supnet
Scanned polaroid images on rag paper
Red embroidery thread
5”x5”
Barb Bottle
Grief:1 (2020; scanned polaroid prints on rag paper and mixed media, 5” x 5”).
Bottle’s mixed media photos of gesturing bodies connected with bright red thread lyrically depict the contortions of grief. They read as documents made to witness and liberate.
Rituals are created in attempts to direct profound forces, such as love and death, that have the power to transform us. Bottle’s use of a white voluminous dress in her choreography is reminiscent of the garb of priestesses, women charged with reading and channeling such forces. Red thread is sewn through each of the three sets photos, as if something is being directed or charted. Several of the photos bear the perforations of a needle, maybe made in preparation to receive the thread, or that are leftover after it has been pulled clear of them. Feet, arms, hands, mouths, tattoos, nooks and crannies—the thread passes through all these things but also clings, encroaches. The spasmodic lines might represent the grief that renders a body but also be the evidence (the wound?) of what once helped hold that body together—a relationship, a bond, a sense of self.