The below text is taken from the 2005 brochure written by David Ross, one of the Past exhibition coordinators at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
The premise of the exhibition is a paradox - can artists use materials to express Im-material realities? The Vancouver-based collaborative team of Virginia Abbot and Ilze Babris, and the Vernon-based Carin Covin use material to create metaphors about non-physical aspects of human experiences. Their works engender poetic resonance through careful manipulation of a variety of materials and thoughtful interventions in the exhibition space.
Lifelines
The collaborative team of Virginia Abbott and Ilze Bebris unravel for us networks of grids, curves, arabesques, compressed and small-scale structures, akin to man-made constructions and engineering feats.
The starting point of Abbot and Babris’ artistic process lies in primordial, tactile, visual and creative activities. collecting objects. Observing their shape, their colour, their weight. Tinkering with them: What associations can the shape recall? How does the object come into contact with its environment? Next, the artists laboriously arrange a wealth of objects, creating esthetic and utilitarian connections. They collaborate to take over the exhibition space an ever-increasing complexity.
“Parallel with nature” is the phrase Paul Cezanne used to describe the nascent ideals of Modern Art in the late 19th century. in the 21st century, our aspirations are bound to artificial environments. Like many contemporary artists and writers, Abbott and Bebris draw from their surroundings, to create a parallel universe that allows enhanced consideration of the original.
Word
In her exhibition, Word Carin Covin explores how the substance of language erodes as it passes through a state of interpretation like in a child's game of telephone. The artist divides language into four parts: Word Thought, a wall drawing, Word Spoken, a cutout, Work Heard, a sewn paperwork and Word Remembered, a work that uses cast shadow. All four works are visual representations of different qualities of language. By separating Word into four parts Covin expresses how each category can be understood as a fracture that contributes to the degradation of meaning. From the speaker’s perspective, the gap between mind (Word Thought) and mouth (Word Spoken) can be great. Word Remembered, traces shadows on the wall like words leaving a fleeting impression in our minds. Covin’s installation also interrogates us: which part ultimately commands the story, the thought, the voice, the ear of the memory?
Covin mentions White on White, 1918 by Kasimir Malevich, a leading figure of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th Century, as an influence for her work. the influence is not only on a formal level - Malevich perceives his 1918 canvas as the culmination of a linear (art historical) thought process. The thought process leads to both a pinnacle (Malevich called his movement Suprematiivism) and nothingness (to describe bluntly what can be seen on the canvas). It would seem that in analogous way, Covin’s works, via their “blankness”, communicate that words are light, tenuous, immaterial.
Ilze Bebris’ practice centres on installation and sculpture, employing everyday materials and manufactured objects to examine the experience of contemporary urban life and the tension between the natural and the artificial. She is interested in the language of materials, the meanings and discourses created by their history and use. Bebris is particularly interested in how changing environments shape our notion of place and identity.
To learn more about Ilze and her current work, visit her website.
Virginia Abbott
Carin Covin received her BFA from Okanagan University College in 2003, and her MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2010. Her artistic practice involves interdisciplinary research of written and visual language through the methodology of visually mapping of textual intersections. Recent exhibitions include Reduction Road, at the Station House Gallery in Williams Lake.