I KNOW ABOUT LOTS OF THINGS I’VE NEVER SEEN. AND SO DO YOU.
Zoe Kreye
Central Gallery
April 22 to June 24, 2023
Curated by Charo Neville
Breathe, listen, feel, connect, observe. Tune into a sensation in your body. What is it telling you?
I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. invites us to trust our internal knowledge. The exhibition shares work by Vancouver-based artist Zoe Kreye created through a studio practice informed by politicized somatics which grounds the artist in her body and allows her to connect with creative forces informed by her bodily sensations. Politicized somatics is a path, a methodology and a change theory by which transformation can be embodied individually and collectively.1 Kreye’s practice involves creating objects and movements through ritualized methodologies which she transforms into immersive public installations. The integration of the artist’s process of making and the viewer’s experience of the work is central to her practice. Kreye’s work is made in relationship to others, alive and dead, human and non-human. It contains activist and healing potential, centering unlearning and concepts of care. Influenced by other feminist artists including the 19th century esoteric painter and mystic Hilma af Klint, Kreye’s work draws on what she calls “body spirit felt aesthetics,” foregrounding a connection with spirit and beauty as an assertion of living.
A site-specific installation of fabric and sculptural objects in the Gallery forms recurring motifs of arches, arcades, and cave entrances as a reference to painted gestures that encapsulate the whole body, suggesting inside and outside spaces. The dimensions of the fabric are determined by Kreye’s own body dimensions, with holes cut to the length of her arm span and height of her body. Kreye’s soft, immersive environments are manifestations of practices that seek to connect with early ways of knowing; her installation recalls the healing caves of Asklepios (early Greek somatic healers), Upper Paleolithic cave dwellings in Germany, and walking arcades that are common public spaces in Greece and Italy. Through this imagery she links ancient caves with arched architecture, remembering a felt sensation of shelter, and inhabitation, and creating intimate spaces for the individual and the collective to connect. Kreye’s translucent, layered, fabric constructions infuse the Gallery experience with the sacred and meditative states Kreye establishes in her studio ritual. This way of working enables intentional actions embodied in the work to connect with the viewer’s body.
In her generative approach Kreye works through the body as a process of unlearning entrenched systems of dominant culture to seek ancient connections that reach backwards and forwards simultaneously. Kreye’s practice is grounded in the intersections of somatics, art, and social justice. This way of working disavows the bounds of western modernist frameworks and capitalist colonial structures and sets up conditions for deeper interconnectedness. Kreye uses exercises from dance, performance, therapy, and bodywork to refine her intuitive impulses which guide her movement and methods in the studio. The process begins with meditative movement into a state of heightened sensory and energetic awareness. Honing methods she has developed over several years, Kreye’s work brings together studies in somatics, mysticism, and bodywork techniques with experiments in colour and practices of pouring, spreading, and dancing dyes across canvas. Stretching canvas across the floor, Kreye uses ink to trace her bodily sensations, repeating and expanding the movement, creating rippling, undulating line drawings on rolls of 100-metre canvas. She creates repeated line patterns by sensing where her body wants to go in that moment, using her body to make the mark. In the Gallery this fabric forms colourful immersive spaces as well as a hammock, inviting other bodies to rest and feel. Kreye shares the vulnerability and tenderness of her studio practice by allowing us to experience public space in a private way.
In previous works, Kreye has made ceramic vessels that viewers can hold to the shape of their own body, and she has prompted viewers to contribute writing to collective posters. Through explorations of what an art object can communicate and what a gallery can be, she considers, “What is the capacity of the performative objects—the ceramics, the drawings, the painting, the fabrics—to heal, to care, or to transmute? A studio practice that is solitary and is quiet, where I’m able to listen.” Her work is made from the body, for the body, as an invitation towards transformation. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. recognizes the instinctive knowledge that we each bring to a gallery space and creates a space of reverence, offering the potential for transformative experiences that can be carried into daily life.
[1] “What Is a Politicized Somatics?” generative somatics. generative somatics: somatics & trauma course, Last modified 2014. https://generativesomatics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Copy-of-What-is-a-politicized-somatics.pdf.
The Artist
Zoe Kreye received a Master’s in Public Art & New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany, in 2009 where she specialized in Social Practice. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, in 2003. Recent exhibitions include Uncommon Language (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2021), Art By Post (Southbank Centre London, Leicester Gallery De Montfort University, 2021), The School of WE (<rotor> Graz Austria, 2021), Person/ne (Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, 2019), Cloth Culture (Lake Country Art Gallery, 2019), Myths (WAAP Vancouver, 2018).
Kreye has been an instructor and lead artist for residencies and programming at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, University of British Columbia, Artscape Gibraltar Point, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Vancouver, Graz University of Technology Austria, Bauhaus University Weimar, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, and Vancouver Parks Board.
She is a full-time artist and mother currently living in Vancouver, the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Kreye’s lineage is of white Northern European ancestry (German, British, Scottish, Scandinavian) as well as western art historical, spiritual, and educational values. Her work seeks to unlearn the myths of separation and supremacy that uphold these legacies.
I know about a love of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. is a quote from Clarice Lispector, dedication by the author in The Hour of the Star, trans. Benjamin Moser, 2nd ed. (New York: New Directions, 2011), xiv.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Women’s Art Initiative and Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.
A D D I T I O N A L R E S O U R C E S
Zoe Kreye
Somatic Painting Ritual, 2022, studio process
Courtesy of the Artist
