About the CIBC C² Art Program

…The Candle Whispered Them Here

This exhibition asks two questions; where do oral histories go? And what if stories had a place to stay? It imagines the practice of storytelling as a ritual through which the trail of words shared within a home find their way into household objects that store them. Presented are five stories from Ghanaian culture that found their way into such objects. Historically, presentations of artwork in this form was often labelled as folk art, due to its decorative nature. Understanding that this practice was a form of mark making, it reimagines folk art as hosts of folklore.

What the Edge Knows

Black is the first to arrive and the last to leave, moving through these works as a witness and connective thread. In this exhibition, Black is not absence but living presence, a reservoir of histories, geographies, and encounters. It is revealed through the contours it gives to light, form, and matter, and shaped by its encounters with bodies, objects and environments. Black absorbs and reflects, obscures and reveals, holding fragments without fixing them as it flows between image and object, weight and light, time and touch.

Internal Circumstances

Internal Circumstances is an exhibition of works in stained glass and copper, that brings together the enduring knowledges and agential forces held within the more-than-human world and at our core. In practicing forest-walking meditation as a form of healing, Hudspith encounters an intuitive knowledge and wisdom present in the earth and vegetation; patterns left by insects in the wood of fallen trees are reminiscent of an unknowable language, and the presence of the shape-shifting wild woman archetype in her maiden, mother and crone aspects. These encounters offer opportunities of healing and insights that deepen self-knowledge and connection. Hudspith harnesses these forces for healing and growth, creating meditative installations for inward-looking and deep feeling.

Serdem

“Serdem” can mean “time,” “the time of,” or represent an urgency in time. The word signifies not only the passage of time, but also reconnection and the urgency of preserving personal and collective heritage. In journeying back to his home country of Kurdistan for the first time in 15 years, Roda collected an array of sources in the form of 3D renderings, motifs, designs and patterns drawn from the objects he encountered. This exhibition features a series of works that weave together a personal history with broader cultural narratives, utilizing traditional and contemporary methods of production, fabrication and archiving. In the intersection of the material, a dialogue opens between past and present, offering a place to explore the intersections between materiality and cultural heritage.

Crépuscule

Crépuscule describes the soft light the moment before the sun rises at dusk, and just after the sun sets at twilight. It’s a moment of anticipation, of before the beginning and after the end. This collection of soft sculptures, or “Wonks” takes us into the artist’s world of play and imagination, while reflecting her own journey of being at the crépuscule; not yet an ending and not yet a beginning, but a key moment in a cycle.

No Thanks, I’m Just Looking

An innocent question posed by the artist’s young son has fueled a deep exploration into capturing the colour of the window in paint, light and colour. In this current body of work, Pszczonak expands the perspective out of the personal and into the worlds and lives of other people he has stumbled upon on social media. Here the artist and viewer become the Flâneur, the spectator who is at once embedded in the world yet removed from it.