The work of three Canadian, female artists are on display in Glenhyrst Art Gallery’s current exhibition, To Piece Together, until March 12.
“To Piece Together is a speculation on the aesthetic possibilities of contemporary collage,” Glenhyrst said. “Collage is a powerfully durational and meditative process that sees incongruent images harmonize together like a satisfying puzzle, creating layers of unexpected meaning. It’s one of the oldest and most popular art forms in history—its inception dates back to 12th century Japan, when poets and calligraphers tore verses from coloured paper then reassembled them on scrolls or screens.”
The exhibit is made up of the works of three artists from southwestern Ontario, Loraine Mohar, Jennifer Murphy, and Monique Vettraino.
“Composed of paper and photographs from found-books and other recycled material, the work of the artists approach collage as a form of visual poetry, a dynamic interplay of emotion and imagination through multidimensional imagery,” they said. “Being universal, inexpensive, and accessible are the profound strengths of collage, traits it shares with other art forms like street art, knitting, and comic books. Likewise, this ties it to creative categories like low-art and kitsch while also anchoring it to socio-economic conversations about class. In their pictures, human and animal bodies are shredded, torn, cut, then painstakingly reassembled using paste and thread into fantastical landscapes, surrealist dreamstates, and ecological allusions. These once broken images are pieced back together and renewed.”
Monique Vettraino is a Toronto-based artist whose autobiographical work examines ancestry, specifically through a female lens, raw exposure, magic, the inexplicable and otherworldly, escapism, and seeking light as well as that which continues to remain buried in the dark.
Jennifer Murphy is a Toronto/Tkaronto based artist working in collage, assemblage, and sculpture using upcycled and reclaimed materials. She examines the interconnectedness of nature and ideas related to ecological mourning through lenses of beauty, chance, transformation, and materiality.
Loraine Mohar is a Hamilton-based collage artist whose work explores facets of femininity and forces of creation and destruction, along with a tongue-in-cheek tale of the tragic experience of life.
The exhibit is on display at Glenhyrst Art Gallery until Wednesday, March 10.
