ESKER FOUNDATION Summer 2018 WELCOME To kick off our sixth year I am thrilled that Esker Foundation is presenting the work of Vanessa Brown and Anna Torma. Brilliantly curated by Shauna Thompson, the work of these two artists uniquely complements each other, and although material selections have little in common, what binds them together is a deep connection and commitment to making. Vancouver- based Brown’s work is a delicate dance of fusing steel, pigment, colour, light, and sound. The Witching Hour is at once sculptural and immersive, suggesting that each single element or object contributes to a larger conversation of symbolic interconnection and magic, as curator Shauna Thompson states: “The stage is set; a bewitched scenography poised in the moment before an action.” Book of Abandoned Details presents the exquisitely detailed large-scale hand embroidered wall hangings and collages of Anna Torma. Now based in Baie Verte, New Brunswick, Torma produces work deeply influenced by both historical and contemporary Hungarian textile traditions. Her work is both a nod to traditional methods and to the subversive feminist avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 70s, that saw the stories and symbolism used in hand sewing as a way to critique dominant idealogies and status quo thinking. In the Project Space we are featuring four Calgary-based artists. We start with Jolie Bird’s project 1597; Harmonious Frequencies, a performance-based installation creating the Fibonacci Sequence, which references the golden ratio found throughout nature. Bird will be performing this work in the space at specific times and dates until July 29. In August through to the end of October we look forward to a collaborative project by Alana Bartol & Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis. Program highlights this summer include talks and workshops with Vanessa Brown, Anna Torma, and Jolie Bird, a tour of the Glenbow Museum's Hungarian textile collection, and a jewelry workshop with Joan Irvin. Dr. Erin Silver, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia, will be speaking about the connections Brown and Torma’s practice have with early-20th century avant-garde workshops, and back by popular demand, a trip to the Canadian Museum of Making. As always, check out our website, the Esker App, Facebook (Esker Foundation), Instagram (@EskerFoundation), or Twitter (@EskerFoundation) for more details, behind the scenes commentary, pictures, and the latest news. Naomi Potter Director/Curator Front Cover: Vanessa Brown, Sun Milk, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Project Pangée, Montréal. Back cover: Anna Torma, Abandoned Details II, 2018, (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Anna Torma, Abandoned Details II, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. 26 MAY – 2 SEPTEMBER VANESSA BROWN The Witching Hour ANNA TORMA Book of Abandoned Details Image courtesy of Vanessa Brown. VANESSA BROWN: THE WITCHING HOUR 26 MAY – 2 SEPTEMBER Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and charm bracelets, is historically powerful and often feminized. fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, glass, Typically worn to denote or commemorate personal narratives, and textile. Her work is hybrid and multidimensional: sculpture milestones, and rites of passage, charms are often given flirting with painting, symbolic narrative collage, a physical and received as heirlooms, and unlike other valued forms of gestalt of states of consciousness. The Witching Hour brings property—such as land and currencies, which have historically together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale been passed down a patrilinear line—charm bracelets and from larger-than-life to intimate. It is a proposal in material, jewellery tend to be passed intergenerationally through the colour, light, and sound; an invitation into an emotively hands of women. charmed circle where magic, fantasy, and humour offer coded Moving away from these works, we are drawn toward a chorus of strategies to consider material histories, our connection to the amphibious croaks. Slipping into the dimness of a meditatively natural and supernatural worlds, and gendered systems of droning bog, we encounter the hypnotic movement of clusters labour, communication, and value. of objects. Undulating as if caught in a slow eddy, these Through a number of interrelated installations, Brown welcomes elements are suspended in front of us within a romantic, semi- us into the liminal space between dreaming and consciousness, apocalyptic swamp. The aura here is ambiguous, though the between the visionary and the here-and-now. Working primarily invitation to rest and stay awhile is clear. In the gentle flow, we with steel, her imaginative formal constellations critique find organic detritus, planetary reflections, and the debris of art and counter the material’s traditional associations with the history which has been liberated from the museum and sunken monumental, masculine, and its use in aggressive industry and with us into the murk. The rotation of the mobiles gestures to military efforts. For Brown, the allure of steel rests in its subtler a cyclical sense of time, and perhaps, the cycles of life and qualities, such as its malleability, adaptability, and delicateness, death. We are brought in close, enveloped by colour and sound: attributes that allude to the rich territory of feminized narratives shrouded inside of an internal space, maternal and womblike, and material associations. but unclearly prenatal or posthumous. The exhibition leads us through a series of fantastic scenarios: a midnight trip to the jeweller’s piercing parlour; the comforting BIOGRAPHY embrace of the bog; and within the light-filled, nurturing garden shed. The symbology of each scene—through material Vanessa Brown works in sculpture, painting, and photography. Her and form—is a dense and surreal system of storytelling. primary medium is steel and she attempts to parse its associations The entrance into Brown’s speculative reality—through the with industry, weaponry and brutality, and its subtler qualities such jeweller’s piercing parlour—greets us with a shop floor arranged as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work with all of the accessories one might need for an otherworldly draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, journey: robes for sleepwalking and daydreaming wait on their recurring symbols from her own dreams, as well as the work and hangers for absent bodies; oversized earrings oscillate between biographies of other female artists. She is based in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territories. Brown graduated with a BFA from the figurative and the abstract. Our state of consciousness is Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of uncertain; an exhausted clock slumbers over our heads. While the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the she is asleep, the rules of time and space have slipped. Against USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two-person exhibitions at the wall rests a menu of options incised into steel, written Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; in an unfamiliar symbolic language. The act of engraving is and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus reminiscent both of tattooing into skin and also of engraving Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle. jewellery; the gesture of committing important information to metal as a method of communicating with and for the future. Vanessa Brown would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Though their scale is large, the forms that these objects assume Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. draw their reference point back to the human body. Practices She would also like to acknowledge and thank her studio assistants Joseph of communicating coded messages through objects displayed Band (metal), and Iman Hassan (textiles/robes), along with Michelle Mackenzie for her sound composition Post Meridiem for Veils of a Bog. on the body is one that recurs in Brown’s practice. Though the hierarchy of metalworking has historically relegated jewellery to a questionably subordinate realm of artisanal craft because of its bodily use, its metaphorical language, in particular that of EXPLORE MORE WITH THE ESKER APP Vanessa Brown, Stained Glass Earrings and Stand, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. ANNA TORMA: BOOK OF ABANDONED DETAILS 26 MAY – 2 SEPTEMBER As a descendant of generations of skilled needleworkers and features embroidered inscriptions or proverbs)—all examples of embroiderers, Anna Torma produces work that is both rooted in women’s handwork brought together in a remarkable reflection a deep Hungarian textile tradition and is also part of a vibrant on domestic space, labour, and value. Collected, treasured, and contemporary practice connected to radical feminist avant- respected by Torma over many years, these common, domestic garde movements of the 1960s and 70s, which reclaimed craft textiles are united in an act of reclamation and tribute to the and fibre-based work as urgent and political fine art practices. value of women’s domestic work. Through the synthesis of techniques such as embroidery, Torma’s wider practice has long included the gathering and drawing, collaging, dyeing, free-hand quilting, appliqué, and sharing of stories through many voices, histories, and materials. photo transfer, Torma’s work offers us an extraordinary world in She will often incorporate the creative work of