MAAP 2021

Jamie Ashforth

I am in new territory. I intentionally position myself in unknown circumstances to encounter heightened embodied experiences of discovery. The body registers this impact: when surprised, there can be a short, sharp inhale, lungs expand quickly, eyes widen, mouth opens, and everything pauses momentarily. My practice is therefore process-led and material-responsive, where I am perpetually out of my comfort zone and charting a new course. Experimental approaches to print, photography, text and installation serve to archive this unpredictable experience of reorientation. Often teetering on the edge of clarity and obscurity, this work expresses an in-between space where protective layers incubate periods of flux. Change is a hazy state.

I see touch as a form of navigation through this process: a dialogue between the senses, thought, emotion, and physical sensation. Event-based practice is a new part of how I unpack the way both tactile and ephemeral stimuli evoke embodied response. My impulse is to index events materially yet moving from object-oriented making towards temporal experiences that leave no visual trace, disrupts that form of memory recall. Instead, the work lives in the body and I’m compelled to excavate that for others to encounter. I therefore pull the viewer into the work to cultivate active participation. Recontextualizing elements from the land, I build interior habitats with natural foraged debris. I initiate new ways of connecting by inviting collaborative experiences across multiple time zones: working on-site outdoors, we bury, then unearth, muddied fabric, or lay down in wild spaces. Blurring the line between near and far, and inside and outside, disrupts how the spaces we inhabit impact us sensorially. This serves to map the liminal nature of place and belonging.

(left to right)

Excavation: August 27, 2021 – Thornhill, Laurie + Kevin, 2021

Wrapped Photographic Print, 18 x 12 cm

Shelter IV, 2021

Mixed Media Assemblage, 31 x 23 x 14 cm

(left to right)

Relocation, 2021

Debris Drawing, 180 x 220 cm

Supine, 2021

Photographic Print, Tracing Paper, 84 x 200 cm

Relocation, 2021

Debris Drawing, 180 x 220 cm

Excavation: August 23, 2021 – Toronto, Rachel, 2021,

Wrapped Photographic Print, 18 x 27cm

Excavation: August 22, 2021 – Muskoka, Dave, 2021,

Wrapped Photographic Print, 20 x 27cm

Excavation: August 22, 2021 – Muskoka, Dave, 2021,

Wrapped Photographic Print, 18 x 27 cm

Excavation: August 19, 2021 – Etobicoke, Erika, 2021,

Wrapped Photographic Print, 18 x 27cm

Excavation: August 27, 2021 – Thornhill, Laurie, 2021,

Wrapped Photographic Print, 18 x 27cm

Shelter V, 2021,

Mixed Media Assemblage, 39 x 32 x 7cm

Groundswell Archive (detail), 2021

Photographic Prints, Paper Envelopes, 90 x 206 cm

Plus/Minus (install shot), 2021

Photographic Prints, Tracing Paper, Mixed Media Assemblages, Debris Drawing

Contact Details

Instagram: @jamie_ashforth

Website: www.jamieashforth.com

Michael Hegarty

Raw canvas became an anchoring element in my paintings. The colour of cotton became the first colour of my abstract compositions. However, the question inevitably arose; why restrict oneself to painting on cotton canvas when there were lots of other fabrics that could be painted on? I began to paint my hardedge geometric designs on pre-printed fabrics from haberdasheries and soft furnishing suppliers. This juxtaposing of painted form and patterned textile created an exciting visual incongruity. The variety of printed fabrics available to me warranted their own study, and I began to see the potential of cloth material coming off a roll with the same possibilities as paint squeezing out of a tube.

Curtain and upholstery fabrics proved more useful than more tenuous cloths. Studying this material led me to study the synergies and parallels between non-objective paintings and decorative curtains. Both employ various colours, designs, and forms on fabric. The major difference between these soft furnishings and paintings besides their function is that the fabric on paintings is stapled onto wooden frames while curtains hang from poles. This difference needed scrutiny as does the prestige of fine art painting versus the lowliness of decorative curtains.

My works explore the topographic nuances of consumer culture, the vagaries of taste in the use of found fabrics from domestic interiors and the rotations of fashion and obsolescence. The oval format I use references the quaintness of modernist abstraction; and the utopian belief in new promises and shapes of the future, a future that certainly cannot be taken for granted any more.

(left to right) Gold Leaf Inversion, 2021

acrylic on pre-printed fabric, 72 x 60cm.

Undulating Canvas (Dakota Spice), 2021,

readymade eyelet curtains on curtain pole, 183 x 400cm.

Undulating Canvas (Dakota Spice), 2021,

readymade eyelet curtains on curtain pole, 183 x 400cm.

(left to right)

Undulating Canvas (Dakota Spice), 2021,

readymade eyelet curtains on curtain pole, 183 x 400cm.

Floral Painting (Lani), 2021,

pre-printed fabric on an oval stretcher, 120 x 93cm.

(left to right)

Floral Painting (Lani), 2021,

pre-printed fabric on an oval stretcher, 120 x 93cm.

Inside the Box (Steel Frames), 2021,

acrylic on pre-printed fabric, 48 x 40cm.

Inside the Box (Steel Frames), 2021,

acrylic on pre-printed fabric, 48 x 40cm.

Inside the Box (Steel Frames) DETAIL, 2021,

acrylic on pre-printed fabric, 48 x 40cm.

Contact Details

Website: www.michael-heg-arty.com

Síomha Callanan

The images I create are direct extracts from the everyday world. The daily places we inhabit often go unnoticed. By moving through spaces and observing everyday details, I consider what may otherwise be seen as mundane as worth capturing. Through the act of walking I engage with the environment in a psychogeographical way, guided by the layout and atmosphere of the city. My methodologies involve exploring my surroundings on foot and photographing elements of the journey I take. I approach each walk as a moment of discovery to find something new within the familiar. I visually document these spaces in an effort to draw attention to the unseen backdrops of quotidian life.

Refined through my process, a heightened visual awareness of my location deepens my connection to that place. By selecting and photographing fragments of my surroundings, I am exploring the everyday as a space of attention. Taking a closer look at the finer details of sceneries enhances my understanding of the world, giving a richer experience. It is a way of slowing down, a way of being present in a space. Capturing the images on film further emphasizes the ideas behind my work, as careful consideration of each frame is a necessary element of working with this medium. I am continually investigating my environment, creating new work to add to my ever-growing archive of images. It is an exercise in observation and documentation; the main objective being to rediscover the very act of looking.