New & Emerging
July 15 – September 2, 2023
New & Emerging, juried by interdisciplinary artist and art educator Parvin Peivandi, visual artist Clare Yow, and Seymour Art Gallery’s curator/director Vanessa Black, is an exhibition that provides exposure to emerging artists.
This fresh and eclectic show presents a collection of work by each of the nine exhibiting artists in a range of media including painting, ceramics, paper works, mixed media installation, photography, paper weaving, and textile embroidery.
Artists: Celan Bouillet, Sena Cleave, Mahtab Eiva, Kyla Gilbert, Jake Kimble, Aiden Kirkegaard, Jacky Lo, Marcie Rohr, and Aileen Vantomme
Special thanks to Opus Art Supplies North Vancouver for their support of this exhibition
and to JJ Bean Coffee Roasters for catering the exhibition reception
Celan Bouillet
Celan Bouillet is a mixed media painter and installation artist whose work investigates ideas of home and our attempt to find our place in transient and surreal natural environments. Bouillet’s mixed media pieces are highly detailed and manipulate scale along with pattern to create complex narratives.
Sena Cleave
Working across text, sculpture, and photographic image making, Sena Cleave explores the slippage that occurs when ideas and materials travel between cultural sites. They pilfer cultural matter from everyday life and repurpose it to address issues of legibility and hybridity in diasporic Japanese experiences. The works titled while remaining a detail it fills the whole picture and as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly are part of a series of paper weavings that explores both the idea and the material force of tension. The process of weaving (of creating tension between warp and weft) disrupts the source materials so that elements that once registered as background details may be reframed or brought forward. Among photographs of the artist’s face and images sourced from archival issues of Japanese women’s magazines, the weavings contain passages from Miriam Silverberg’s essay The Modern Girl as Militant and Izumi Suzuki’s short story Night Picnic.
Mahtab Eiva
Mahtab Eiva’s exhibited paintings were inspired by one of the latest tragedies in Iran, the death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the so-called ‘morality police.’ In The Criminals, Eiva has meticulously painted traditional Iranian tiles in the background, then covered most of her work with gold leaf. The obscuring of these tiles represents how Iranian women are advocating to replace the traditional thoughts and culture that have neglected and oppressed them. Iranian women are proudly declaring their identities without feeling shameful, while fearlessly fighting for their rights.
Kyla Gilbert
Kyla Gilbert’s process is influenced by her background in puppetry and environmental science, and an interest in abstract painting. She is curious about applying the language of one discipline to another and seeing the ways in which juxtapositions can be created (sculpture through a performer’s lens, painting through a sculptor’s lens). Her method of creation, material assemblage, reflects this collaging of different knowledge forms. Gilbert approaches her process as a site for improvisation that results in the creation of objects full of discrepancy, juxtaposition, awkwardness, and joy.
Jake Kimble
Grow Up is a series about perspective, and how artist Jake Kimble chooses to view his own histories of being a kid, two-spirited, alive. By excavating a variety of personal archives, including notes from therapy, credit card receipts, and family photos, the artist pieces together a non-linear narrative investigating the act of processing. By layering text directly onto photos, it allows these seemingly familiar adages to take on different meanings depending on the viewer’s state of mind, their true nature being elusive and transfigurative. For Kimble, this act of reflection is a personal ceremony. It reflects his maxim that if something is mentionable, it is manageable: a strategy for coexisting with one’s truths and traumas. Doing so in a way that has humour and pathos not only makes it easier, but hopefully extends an invitation for others to do so as well.
Aiden Kirkegaard
Aiden Kirkegaard’s work explores how memories accumulate within domestic space, building upon one another in the same way that painted brushstrokes and colour build layers in a painting. Over the past few years, Kirkegaard’s relationship with home has changed and she has found herself wanting to reconnect with her younger self. Coming out of the pandemic, there is a need to restore imagination and play. These paintings reflect an imagined transitional space that allows someone to enter into a joyful remembered past. The painted abstract spaces provide a space for the viewer to explore, dream, and play so that they too can reconnect with their unencumbered self.
Jacky Lo
Jacky Lo’s silk and paper-based works focus on exploring the production and materiality of silk, linking it to skills, lost histories, and migration of the artist’s family. Like a Moth to a Flame (飞蛾扑火) highlights the complexity of silk as a natural fibre and its extraction and production of the silkworm. Considering the history of silk with Lo’s own, the silk embroidery reimagines the forgotten experiences and skills of Lo’s great-grandmother who was a master embroiderer in China but had to let go of her practice due to the Cultural Revolution. Slow Burn and Mùrè I (Mulberry I, 木热 I) are handmade papers from mulberry leaves that silkworms consume. The burnt marks on the paper emulates the bite marks and immolation of silkworm, representing the lost skill of the artist’s great-grandmother.
Marcie Rohr
The use of layers in artist Marcie Rohr’s work is her way of mimicking transformation in life, as it occurs in unwavering repetition and variety. Occurring incrementally, moment to moment, seemingly invisible, or in the form of sweeping, dramatic change, it seems that existence itself can be summarized as an endless layering of transformations. Rohr’s artistic practice has evolved into a meditation on this continual progression. She paints in acrylics, translucent and fast drying, and their layers slowly build up, sometimes over years. Rohr introduces oil paint, purposely confusing her sense of time, forcing the progression of the work to slow down, until forms that feel right to her emerge. These compositions often hang in a balance between geographical and figurative. The oneness of body and land is a place that Rohr muses on continually, and most of her works are explorations of this intersection.
Aileen Vantomme
Aileen Vantomme is a visual artist, with a recent refocus on ceramics. She works in stoneware solely by hand, using both coil and slab built methods, to create textures and forms heavily influenced by much time spent on the shoreline of Gabriola Island. While walks along the shoreline provided a respite from the pandemic stresses, the discarded shells provided moments to pause and explore the intricacies of the simple life form with touch. This physical connection proved most calming for Vantomme and revealed to her why beach combing is such a popular pastime. New work, inspired by the ubiquitous sea shell, augments traditional clay techniques with custom formulated glazes to embody the shell’s tactile components while conveying the handmade process. Deposited in a grouping, the vessels are ready for collection and provide an alternative keepsake to the simple moments lost during these last few challenging years.