UPON FURTHER DISCUSSION...
Josh Allan
Deb Fong
Kazia Poore
Elizabeth Sigalet
The Cube
September 21 to October 26, 2019
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Josh Allan, Deb Fong, Kazia Poore and Elizabeth Sigalet initiated a Polite Conversation in their final year as Bachelor of Fine Arts students at Thompson Rivers University. Coming from different perspectives and using different mediums, the four students began their project by employing a “call and response” approach as a way to step outside their own ways of working and to expand their methods of making art in an attempt to push the boundaries of their own practices.
Josh Allan’s practice is influenced by the grand narratives and graphic drawing found in comics. Deb Fong’s research takes her into the history of still life painting where she works beyond the flat canvas and brings a contemporary feminist perspective to the genre. Kazia Poore uses photography to explore personal expression through the gestural movement of people’s hands. Elizabeth Sigalet uses sourced material and photographic manipulation to investigate the relationship between the natural landscape and human engineering projects within it.
For their collaborative project at the Kamloops Art Gallery, the artists are executing call and response works within The Cube for the two-week installation period prior to the opening reception. This methodology plays off of Surrealist drawing games like the exquisite corpse, where multiple artists collaborate, responding to the previous artists’ work to create a finished work that focuses on the process as much as the result. To begin this project, each artist claims a wall of the gallery, initiating a call, then invites the other artists to respond. The responses are without guidelines or limitations, with each artist knowing their work may be added to, blotted out or erased completely and replaced by new work. Upon further discussion… is an exercise in multi-authorship and collaboration in an attempt to go deeper into the Polite Conversation that initiated the artists’ collaborations during their BFA studies.
Deb Fong and Kazia Poore
Hand Holding Lemon, 2018
acrylic and photo on canvas
91.4 x 91.4 cm
