HerWORK March 6 – April 1, 2017

Healing #10 Kamea by Alexis Marie Chute

Alexis Marie Chute, Becky Thera, Kasie Campbell, Kun Chen, Lucille Frost, and Shirley Serviss

HerWORK 2017

March 6^th 2017 – April 1^st 2017.

Opening Reception: March 8^th 2017 from 6pm to 8pm.

This is an annual group exhibition held in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8^th 2017. This show is hosted as a way for MCPAG to feature the work of six contemporary artists exploring themes of feminine identity.

Childhood 1 by Kun Chen

About the Artists

Alexis Marie Chute

Award winning photographer, Alexis Marie Chute, creates large-format conceptual portraits of individuals in their time of healing following hardship.  In “The Quiet Rebuild” Alexis Marie compassionately exposes the private struggles of volunteer models as they rebuild their lives after loss, mental or physical illness, domestic instability, abuse, addiction, and infertility. These fine art photographs feature people that came forward to Alexis Marie’s call for volunteers on social media. Alexis Marie gets to know these individuals and creates an image of each that communicates their experience. The link between art and healing is one that Alexis Marie strives to explore, quite literally as her volunteers participate in this public form of storytelling, and also figuratively as she confronts universal heartache and the resiliency of the human spirit.

Becky Thera

Becky Thera is currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts in Drawing and Intermedia at the University of Alberta. The embroidery in the works reference her family’s matriarchal traditions. “My great-­?grandmother and grandmother embroidered to indicate their skill as a wife and mother. They embroidered household items such as baby clothes or table cloths, but it was considered a hobby and not artistic practice. The dresses celebrate this skill as art, elevating embroidery from its position as craft even within modern society. The floral imagery directly references the feminine motifs found in my great-­?grandmother’s patterns. Through bright colour and intricate embroidery, the work embraces and celebrates the overtly feminine. The process of embroidery also implies an ethics of care and the maternal. Such effort and thought contributes to each stitch created in the work. The result is a work of labour and love, both qualities which are necessary to change our current patriarchal culture.”

Kasie Campbell

Kasie Campbell is an Edmonton based sculptor who has recently launched her career after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta. She has extensive exhibition history including several international exhibitions. “Through provocative sculptural work along with performative means of transcending the sense of purpose that these components may first have, I aim to confuse notions of appeal with revolt, pleasure with disgust. I aim to magnify the psychological charge that exists when we are in a moment of suspended awareness about what is decidedly beautiful or grotesque.  The sculptural works are comprised of women’s nylons, thread, cotton batting, wire, and wood. Most of the sculptures are life-size and compare to the human presence. The sculptures are simultaneously attractive and repulsive; they have a degree of abstraction yet possess a life-like quality, which in turn renders them” uncanny.

Kun Chen

“My work explores themes of identity and cultural hybridity while investigating the delicate balance and conflict between contemporary and traditional Chinese value. I was born and raised in Fujian, China where I studied calligraphy and Tai-Chi as a child. Though these activities I became fascinated by traditional Chinese way of thinking about the would. Since coming to Canada to study Western Art, I’ve searched actively for ways to create a fusion of North American and Chinese cultural ideas through the visual arts.”

Lucille Frost

Lucille Frost is a visual artist and arts administrator who has spent the last decade building her practice in Edmonton Alberta. Her Mission is to establish her creative practice and small business in Canada with the goal of becoming a sustainably employed producer of creative and cultural capital for communities. Born in Edmonton and raised in Lethbridge Alberta Lucille identifies her home with the various landscapes throughout her native province and her relationship to this distinct natural beauty has continually been a source of inspiration within her artistic practice. Currently she is working on a multidisciplinary project entitled “Portrait of the Artist as Landscape” exploring power, gendered identity, formal abstraction and public presentation of landscape imagery.

Shirley Serviss

Shirley A. Serviss is a poet and non-fiction writer, editor and instructor. She works as the literary staff Artist on the Wards for the Friends of University Hospitals. She has a strong interest in visual art as a collector, a frequent gallery visitor, and reader of art publications. She collaborated with printmaker Akiko Taniguchi in a limited edition book Imagine Time, of poems by Stroll of Poets members and Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists in 2001. Shirley wrote an essay for the catalogue of the Inside the Dress art exhibit at the McMullen Gallery (2005) and a series of stories to accompany the drawings of Garneau Houses/Homes by Wendy Gervais for an exhibit at the McMullen Gallery in 2014. She is starting to call herself a collage artist and has exhibited and sold her collage pieces in the Friends of University Hospitals fundraisers and exhibited in the Kitchen exhibition at the Edmonton Women’s museum the fall of 2016. Her mixed-media collages combine words and imagery in an illustrative way, but a bit playfully.

Upheaval by Kasie Campbell