Megan Kammerer
9. Sutures
Visual Arts Centre of Clarington
July 3 - September 4, 2022
Curated by: Matthew Kyba and Megan Kammerer
Artists: Emii Alrai and Eve Tagny
Installation: TJ Ediger
Photo Documentation: LF Documentation
Tagny + Alrai come together after months of digital collaboration to disrupt traditional installation making at the VAC. Inspired by their recent virtual AKA project, investigating how non-Western cultures represent trauma through landscape and artifacts, the pair erupt from digital modes of collaboration to harmonize their interests in the gallery’s physical space.
Tagny + Alrai will travel to Clarington in June 2022 for a one-month residency onsite at the VAC. They will visit garden sites, research local history, explore regional iconography, and examine how monuments propagate territorial statehood and settlement in the Durham Region. With free studio access, the pair will experiment in ceramic hand building, film making, and video projection to create multidisciplinary installations that blur the line between each individual practice. The deferred project holds inherent contingencies that leave no room for rigid dogma. Thus the artists’ work during this period of free play and experimentation embodies a stubborn resilience to reignite the gallery’s exhibition spaces.
The coalescing exhibition Sutures opens on Sunday, July 3, 2022. After injury, a suture makes you whole. Its scar, though rough or imperfect, signifies a healing. This transformative process is not unlike Alrai + Tagny’s production as the artists negotiate themes of reflection, healing, and physical reconnection. As China Miéville writes, “Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”
Informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity, and post-colonial museum practices of collecting/displaying objects, Alrai weaves together historical narratives by forging artifacts and visualizing residues of cultural collision. Her work contains elements which are broken or unfinished and hover between the formal polish of an imperial museum, archaeological dig, or the residue of a performance. Alrai questions the value and origin of artifacts, while navigating diasporic experiences.
Tagny focuses on how communities at the margins commit to living, rather than merely surviving through a lens-based installation practice. She centres garden spaces to mend traumatic disruptions in accordance with nature. She investigates these man-made sanctuaries that simultaneously encompass all stages of the living—from luscious growth to decay—to engage in processes of renewal, reconnection, and transformation.
Sutures is organized by the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.