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- Title of Exhibit Proposal:
"Three Women, Three Tales, Three Voices" (Ref #218)
- Date:
- 26-10-2006 18:17:53
- Status:
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Accepted with revisions
- Rating:
- 7
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Details:
- The exhibition entitled, "Three Women, Three Tales, Three Voices", proposes to reveal the role craft making has had in the work of three Canadian art jewellers from three separate ethnic backgrounds and decades.
Each artist's work contains aspects of storytelling that focuses on their personal response to familial, cultural and social attitudes of their generation. Their visual voices unite to represent the distinct Canadian experience of living within a cultural mosaic.
"Three Women, Three Tales, Three Voices" will be a reflection of their search for wholeness/home/identity in the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual realms. Their work is inspired by a desire for well-being and this is accomplished through the making of their individual art, craft and design.
Narrative object making can be a means to communicate beyond language. Visual clues create a dialogue that reaches out to the universal audience. Their work gives important and significant hints to future generations about how they negotiated their lives. It will also demonstrate how they contributed to the current intellectual dialogue surrounding the making of fine craft.
Traditionally, oral storytelling explicated natural phenomena, the complexities of life or granted insights and direction to the journey of the human condition. Sarabeth Carnat, Shona Rae and Kari Woo are telling personal stories visually that contribute to the material culture and give a degree of understanding to people who interact with their work. By physically expressing their personal and universal stories they provide courage and insights to what others may, or may not, be able to articulate.
As each woman is mindful of the context in which she practices her art making this exhibition will also demonstrate how they effect the relation between skill, intellect and culture within three individual visions of craft practices.
Sarabeth Carnat's work is inspired by a desire for well-being; intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually.
Growing up in the 1950's, as the oldest daughter of a traditional Jewish family Sarabeth was steeped in a world of social and familial expectations. Her work reflects the frustrations and the joys of trying to maintain a professional practice amidst the ignorance of expectation.
For instance, Sarabeth was expected to wear restrictive undergarments as a young woman. Hence she responds with a neckpiece "Suffer for Beauty BE" that is sharp and uncomfortable to wear yet cleverly reveals the myth of beauty as it was understood in her era.
Shona Rae, raised in the 60's, was deeply influenced by the women's movement for equal rights. She was left feeling disappointed with the insipid heroines of classic fairytales. As her artwork is inspired by ancient myth, folklore and ancient religious artifacts she is given to re-writing the ending of traditional western fairytales to demonstrate how gender roles have changed in this millennium.
For instance, in Rapunzel's Escape, instead of passing her golden braid (her power) off to her lover or her mother, our heroine wields it like a dominatrix's whip as she dances aloft the crumbling tower of a patriarchal society.
Shona is interested in furthering the discussion around the future of fine craft, art and object making. She creates work that defies wearing as a means of influencing the dialogue around traditional sculpture and goldsmithing practices. Her work begs the question; is it sculpture or is it jewellery? As it has no sense of place it is easily left outside the box, where, like the unwanted child, we are forced to ponder its future. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a new tale.
Kari Woo grew up in Calgary in the 70's with a strong sense of family and place. Her motivation has been the investigation of the search for identity as a response to the migration of her family from their original homeland in China.
Using family photographs and mixed media Woo creates dioramic settings that are intimate narratives infused with sentiment and personal history while providing a broader frame work for the jewellery to live in. Often the function of the piece is secondary or not obvious as it sits in these settings. The audience is provoked to participate in the intimacy of her personal story when they remove the jewellery object to wear it themselves. This can possibly connect them with another's experience or their own.
Her pieces are ritual experiments to encourage interaction, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. They instigate curiosity and playfulness as a path into looking at deeper issues of cultural Diaspora, migration, integration and/or assimilation.
"Three Women, Three Tales, Three Voices"; they overlap in spirit but they have distinct flavours and styles that blend seamlessly to produce a dynamic and diverse exhibition. Each are gifted with an experienced worldview, a definite sense of place, a relationship with materials, a strong visual language, and the nesseccary inner stillness to create meaningful craft objects.
This exhibition could be comprised of 10- 25 pieces of sculptural art jewellery objects.
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