Untitled (new visions)
Maggie Groat and Barbara Hobot
January 23 – February 28, 2015
Artist Talk: Barbara Hobot 12pm, Thursday, January 22, 2015; Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
Opening reception 8pm Friday, January 23, 2015
Curated by Tarin Hughes
Ongoing Reading Lists by Leah Bruce, Fine Arts Coordinator, Francis Morrison Central Library are created to accompany each exhibition. The January list related to Untitled (new visions) can be found here.
Untitled (the possibilities of voids and the sentience of things) grew out of a threefold dialogue rotating largely around imagination, association and truth. Since the summer 2014 exhibition of Untitled at Elora Centre for the Arts, this discourse has evolved and forged a new iteration and presentation of Groat and Hobot’s ongoing, individual research. Untitled (new visions) includes new works by both artists as well as a renegotiation of existing elements of the former exhibition.
The curatorial thesis behind Untitled is inspired by Elaine Scarry’s Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium) and her proposition that the presence of a flower triggers dreams, ghosts of recognition and/or memory. Scarry’s discussion of the sentience of flowers and the power of absence/ presence gave way to considerations of the life of the object and the charged space between the real and the false. In Untitled, the artists present a visual dialogue between their work, their individual means of exploration and their shared pursuits. They each approach their practices from an investigative perspective; perhaps Groat is the shaman and Hobot is the philosopher. However visually divergent, their works are concerned with studying, proposing and considering the form, function and life of their subject matter.
Maggie Groat is a visual artist working in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists’ books, site-specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, Groat’s work explores studies for possible futures, salvage practices, and relationships and reconnections to place, from an indigenous/settler perspective. Through reconfiguring and recontextualizing found materials, she assembles collages, sculptures, tools and texts that enable moments of envisioning and the potential for action. Maggie studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is represented by Erin Stump Projects in Toronto and currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario.
Barbara Hobot is a recent MFA graduate from Western University, London, Ontario and she holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally with exhibitions at Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto; DNA Artspace, London (ON); Art Mûr, Montreal; Galerie Kurt im Hirsch, Berlin; and Chiellerie Gallery, Amsterdam. Apart from her solo practice, she periodically collaborates with fellow artist Patrick Cull. Most recently, the pair offered a mobile knife-sharpening service as part of the Windsor-Essex Triennial at the Art Gallery of Windsor. Hobot has participated in residencies in Canada, the United States, and Europe and is the recipient of awards from the Ontario Arts Council among other foundations. She lives and works in Kitchener, Ontario and is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.
Image credits:
Maggie Groat, Moonlight Reflectors or A Proposal for Returning Moonlight Back to the Moon
(December 6, 2014), 2012 – 2015, mirrors, Tinfoil, various found objects, various sizes.
Barbara Hobot, Gaps Full of Potential, 2014, hand-cut mahogany veneer, acrylic on paper, steel.
