This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Being an image-conscious child created some very particular struggles for my family. In the nineties we were just making it in our middle class economic reality, but we managed quite well on a single income thanks to my mother’s fastidious money management. Frozen and canned vegetables, and the fact that I was completely ambivalent about missing my expensive elementary school ski lessons, helped our financial security along as well.
A struggle my parents had because of our tight income, was dealing with their very visual and stubborn child’s extremely particular ideas about self-presentation. Somehow I was able to wrangle more than a couple of brand new Northern Getaway cartoon animal sweatshirts, in purple or teal, to put in the mix with hand-me-downs from my cousin which I inherited from my older sister. I must have given my parent’s financial ledger quite the headache.
Power in Passivity
Ideas of privilege, oppression, and agency have been churning through the mixer in my brain since I visited Jody Macdonald’s exhibition, Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?, on the last day of April. The artist’s series of little fabric sculptural figures, rendered in immaculate and staggering detail, provided a great jumping off point for me to delve into ideas of how visuality informs identity. Specifically speaking, it provides some pretty rich material about how much of a hand we can have in this process.
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In this week’s Vue Weekly, Amy Fung takes on Jody MacDonald’s Will The Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?, on display in the Main Gallery until 29 May.
Oddball humorous and morbidly crafty, MacDonald riffs off everything from twisting jargon like “Fishing For Compliments” to Jungian archetypes of self formation. Most of the individual pieces reveal this grappling of ideas and theory with the straightforward use of text demarcating which identity they are expressing. Working as a whole, their messaging carries more resonance as each character exists in relation to each other, with some alienated by or away from each other.
Read the rest.
Latitude 53 Video Podcast
Vancouver artist Jody MacDonald talks to us about her sculpture show, “Will The Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?” opening 30 April 2010 at Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture.
Tonight, Jody will give an artist talk at 7:00 followed by an opening reception for both her show and Patrick Higgins’ in the ProjEx Room at 8. You can read more about their shows on our website.
Edmonton artist Stephanie Johnsson wrote a monograph essay for us on Jody MacDonald’s show Will The Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up? Here’s an excerpt:
In works like “Tourist Attraction”, the stage is set with a surreal, strange forest near the sea. A family of deer stares at the viewer, as if the viewer were behind a camera and coaxing them to smile for a portrait. Their bodies have abnormalities - mutated phalanges sprout through the tops of their heads. At first they seem like a strange deer family that stands on their haunches like humans, but one of them has a deer body and upon closer examination we realize the upright deer have antlers that are made of human hands. The piece references Frida Kahlo’s painting, “The Little Deer” (1946). In Kahlo’s original, her own face peers out at the audience as the face of the wounded deer. MacDonald has removed the face and created a cutout where tourists can place their own faces and pose for a photo opportunity, MacDonald makes her rendering three dimensional, almost like a stage, creating a multi-layered effect.
Read the rest on our website.
Jody MacDonald’s show opens this Friday—she’ll give an artist talk at 7 followed by a reception at 8 pm.
What happens when an artist is using every available plinth know to Latitude…and still needs two more? Well you make them of course.
On Tuesday Vancouver Artist Jody MacDonald turned the ProjEx Room into a makeshift woodshop for the afternoon and constructed two beautiful new plinths!
Handy Woman Indeed!
