Body Objects: Jeanne Crandall and Anna Ugolkova
MEET the artists during public hours, Thurs-Sat 11am-6pm in March
Across time and culture, humans have used object intermediaries to reinforce and test social boundaries, to commune with the otherworldly, and to challenge authority that surpasses the limitations of the living social body. These objects are not inert; they embody our most deeply held beliefs about ourselves and our relationship to the physical world, becoming extensions of our own somatic experience. Activated with our imposed meaning, they are vessels that we fill with intent, but they also withhold their own secret existence. The work (and play) in this residency explores our relationships with objects as effigies, surrogates, extensions of the human body and as intermediaries that bridge conceptual experience to our corporeal reality.
Jeanne Crandall
I am an emerging interdisciplinary artist settled in Alberta on Blackfoot traditional land, navigating the turbulence of the Anthropocene and menopause through a reconnection to, and celebration of, the ambiguity and instability of corporeal, embodied existence that connects us to the living complexity of our planet. My work situates itself on the margins of ideology and experiential knowledge in response to the
disengagement of a digitized, idealist post-colonialist society. Often grotesque, subjective, confessional, and bodily (both human and non-human), the ambivalence of my subject matter offers space for intuitive memories to materialize.
Anna Ugolkova
My works consist of a variety of elements: from paintings, sculptures - found and reworked or created from scratch - to photographs, video art, words and performance. In my art practice I’m exploring the memories that physical objects preserve and the often-unseen relationships between material things. Major concerns of my works are form, material and reconstruction of meaning. I am revising ideas and things and seek to shift the experience of objects and create new narratives.
In many ways I am questioning the original properties of things and their meanings. Does an object, shape, line or form can be given a leading role in a single art work? How many analogies and correlations are between objects we daily create and see, and to what extent we can approach their inner life? Through the process of creation, I pursue the materiality of things, observing and transforming things around us, looking for our physical and mental connections to them and inviting viewers to reevaluate the world of objects that often passes unnoticed in daily life.
Anna Ugolkova graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the fi eld of visual art in 2019, presenting a mixed media installation Island. She has exhibited and performed at venues in the Czech Republic, Canada and Austria, including the Kampus Hybernska Gallery, Prague, Deer Lake Gallery, Burnaby, AUArts Residency Exhibition, Calgary, Ministry of Casual Living gallery, Victoria, 13th Prague Quadriennal and Fries Theater, Innsbruck.
