Hide and Seek is a children’s game. It can also be thought of more broadly as the act of concealment and of searching. The works in this exhibition ask viewers to consider the things from our past that we consciously and subconsciously hide as well as the objects and spaces in which we seek comfort and refuge.
By staging obscure scenarios of objects floating in spaces and blanket forts in deep dark rooms I intend to evoke the tensions that lie between the perceived magic and anxiousness of the childhood experience. Informed by collections, ephemera, monsters, and memory, Hide and Seek is an exhibition that recalls the past through constructions in the present in order to understand the experience of growing up and more broadly living with anxiety in the world today.- Heather Leier, 2016.
Creation of this work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Alberta.
Heather Leier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary in Treaty 7 region in southern Alberta, Canada. Through her art practice, she employs research-creation approaches to examine embodied trauma and problematize shared assumptions of socially constructed life-phases and identities. This work ranges from the production of printed ephemera to life-size site-specific print installations all of which draw attention to negotiations of space and endurance with violence. Leier has exhibited her work widely both nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Spain, China, USA, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, Poland, Egypt, Mexico, and Taiwan. Leier has curated a number of contemporary art projects and was the 2020 recipient of the University of Calgary Sustainability Teaching Award.
For more information about Leier and her work, visit her website.