This virtual curation features the work of Tiffany Moore, Amber Lomax, Theo Trotter and Ketty Zhang who participated in our Winter 2021 Studio Mates Session. We enjoyed the three months we spent getting to know one another and offering support and feedback on each others work! Below are examples or their artwork and a bit about their practices.
Tiffany Moore
Born in South Carolina and raised across the U.S. from Washington D.C. to Tempe, I am currently based in Québec.I use drawing as a means of communication in hopes of creating connection and empathy. My drawings explore ideas of the self and the implications of belonging and otherness. Elements of home and nostalgia are incorporated into my work through allegories of nature.
Amber Lomax
Amber is inspired by imagery from her vivid dream life. Her dream journal provides fuel for painting exploration and the act of painting itself is a dialogue between the conscious and subconscious as each work evolves. Born in Truro, Great Britain she graduated from Reading University in 2001. Amber moved to Canada in 2010 and paints from her home on Vancouver Island.
Theo Trotter
My work references the trans body as a palimpsest, through the marks of transformation and trauma that manifest on it. In "The Archaeology of Ruins," Dora Petursdottir and Bjorn Olsen write that “in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century English tailors, wrinkles and tears in clothes were commonly called ‘memories’. Far from being intentionally embodied or inscribed, these wrinkles still memorized the interaction, the mutual constitution, of people and things.” Much like the way flaws in clothing accumulate over time, revealing the history of the wearer, scars, wrinkles, bruises, calluses and all kinds of marks and blemishes build up on our skins as a monument to our histories.
I approach this work through mixed media, papermaking and bookmaking, and also utilize materials such as clothing, bedding or medical supplies. I have an interest in these images as a form of non narrative, non linear storytelling, as my work has a connection to memory and the act of remembering, which is often fragmentary and connected to small details that only become important long after the remembered event, or appear again in dreams, nightmares, and physical sensations. I am interested in images that walk the thin line between beautiful and disgusting, and the powerful effect this can have on a viewer. This dichotomy between beauty and disgust, or attraction and repulsion, represents both injury and healing.
Ketty Zhang
In her recent series of work in progress, Ketty Zhang embeds printed screenshots of her chat history on social media in resin and displays them like collectables. By taking intimate online exchanges offline, converting the digital into physical, Zhang finds beauty in retriving the snippets of conversations from a seemingly limitless data archive to display them on very limited wall space in her home.
Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist currently based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations known as Vancouver. www.kettyhaolinzhang.com | @kettyzzz
