YOKE is a multi-disciplinary show gathering recent works by fourfirst-year MFA students at UBC-Okanagan: Michaela Bridge-Mohan, Natasha Harvey, Xiaoxuan / Sherry Huang, and Scott Moore.
Art is a practice of yoking as much as it is the very material by which things come together and continues to hold us together.Gathering under the exhibit’s name, these works collectivelycontemplate the apparatuses and affects that bring us together, anidea made fraught by the pandemic. How should we be when we’re together? And how can art help us imagine ways to continuebeing together that are sustainable, caring, forgiving, loving – to ourselves and to each other?
Xiaoxuan / Sherry Huang is an interdisciplinary poet who plays in the mediums of music, photography, and print. She conceives of poetry as both a happening (an event with a time and a place,) and an art object. She seeks to create poems that are immersive, embodied, and experiential works of art in their own right.
Her recent full-length publication, Love Speech, (Metatron Press 2019,) is an intersection between poetry and epistolary auto-theory.
Across her body of work, she is interested in love, speech act theory, epistolary address, and écriture féminine.
Connect with her online at xiaoxuanhuang.com and on instagram as @xiao_xuan_huang
Artist Statement:
IF YOU ARE / CERTAIN OUTLINES
vinyl-cut poem on transparent inkjet film, two-channel projection of 35 mm photos, ambient guitar drone (6 minutes / looped forever).
The text in IF YOU ARE/CERTAIN OUTLINES belongs to a larger collection of anti-narrative love poems currently being written, called ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME explicitly triangulates the relationship between love, queerness, and time by presenting traces of love over long distances, long terms, and of longing that persists despite separation.The seamless looping of sound and image in IF YOU ARE/CERTAIN OUTLINES evade compositional linearity, recreating queerness’s anachronism in three-dimensional space.
Natasha Harvey – Artist Statement
Natasha creates both abstract and representational works of art. She is a mixed media artist and collage is a key element in her work. Mixed media gives her an immense platform of creativity and expression. Natasha is passionate about two dimensional disciplines in visual art. Drawing, painting, photography and printmaking practises are combined and layered in her art making process. Natasha has discovered throughout her education and career, that the process is as important as the completed work of art.
The paint is given a voice. The energy of the medium, expressed in pools of paint, dripped across the canvas, springs to life without the intervention of a brush or knife. Energetic mark making illustrate a feeling of vitality, spirit and spontaneity. Her most recent mixed media paintings depict landscape. The landscapes are abstracted and large scale. It is her intention to evoke an emotional response through her use of colour, texture, atmosphere and composition. Collage brings forth areas of photography. Photographic images are torn up and reassembled to create a new world, a local landscape that doesn’t really exist. Photographs work harmoniously with the more abstract areas of the composition. Texture, drips and puddles blend with representational images, creating an ebb and flow, a push and pull between reality and the imagination.
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