January 7 – February 19, 2022
The Main Gallery
This exhibition is an assemblage of two and three-dimensional work that explores the remembrance of the body posthumously. The installation includes soft sculpture, mixed media, photography and video projection. Cocoon is a bundled heart-like form, free-standing soft sculpture, constructed with various felting techniques. The materials contradict the warmth of nostalgia and the harsh industrial spaces we pass through daily—the residue of our time in the city and what that looks like visually. White noise is a mixed media sculpture inspired by Baroque aesthetics and Surrealist notions of questioning reality. Containers of Grief map out the lungs’ vascular system and the emotional space of our mourning—industrial materials used for padding, insulating and connecting. Knox’s acupuncturist told her that our grief is held in our lungs. It is the space we let go through the act of breathing. The function of industrial felt is to protect mechanical equipment, dampen sound vibrations and help filter air. Using this material to map the structure of the lungs is an attempt to connect the actions of the material to the process of grieving: to soften, filter and protect. These works are a collection of contemplations about ultimate hindsight—nostalgic, peaceful and a bit hazy.
While much of pop culture has addressed our departure from this world with a vision of white light, this exhibition contemplates this experience in reverse. What would our lives look like, remembered from the other side? A foggy dream state of texture, colour and form play critical roles within the sculptures, photography and film projection. By choosing mainly formal solutions, Knox tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, the artist wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic objects, which leave traces, and balance on the edge of both recognition and alienation. This installation appears as dreamlike spaces where fiction and reality meet: well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Physiology and memory always play a key role. Lindsay Knox’s works are characterized by everyday objects in which recognition plays an important role by applying a poetic and often metaphorical language. Her collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated materials for memory and projection. As Hannah Arendt cites from Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: “the possible seems true, and the truth exists, but it has many faces.”
Artist’s Biography
Lindsay Knox is a Canadian artist living in Edmonton, Alberta. Her studio practice has been punctuated by personal experiences of birth and death. These events have shaped her research and art-making in diverse ways, blurring art and craft within themes of transformation, domestic space, and memory. Her interdisciplinary practice employs textiles, ceramics, photography and drawing. She has been a recipient of the Edmonton Arts Council Trust Fund Award, attended the Banff Centre for the Arts thematic residencies and completed her MFA in Drawing and Intermedia from the University of Alberta.
Top Image: white-noise (detail), Q-tips, horn, rubber hose, and canvas
Photo by Craig Knox
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