Circles & Wigs: Best Friends Forever: Jessica Groome & Ashleigh Bartlett

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Jessica Groome & Ashleigh Bartlett, "CIRCLES & WIGS, Circle and Wig Pairing 1, Toronto," 2015

mixed media, dimensions variable, Image courtesy of the Artists

Opening Reception - Saturday, April 14, 6:30 to 8:00 pm

Artist Talk  - Thursday, April 12, 5:30 to 6:30

CIRCLES & WIGS is a collaborative practice between Jessica Groome and Ashleigh Bartlett creating drawings, paintings and installations. Living in different cities, they have conducted intensive self-directed residencies in each other’s studios since 2015 to produce new work playing off each other’s practices. For this exhibition, the two artists worked from their respective cities for six months before coming together at the Kamloops Art Gallery for a two-week residency to complete the project in The Cube.

The exhibition uses the German minimalist painter and sculptor Imi Knoebel’s series of paintings titled 24 Farben für Blinky (24 Colours for Blinky), as a departure point. Knoebel painted the series in 1977 as a tribute to his friend, artist Blinky Palermo, following Blinky's death earlier that year. This was a turning point in Knoebel’s practice because of his embrace of painting and his selection of colours based on his feelings for his friend and the works he left behind.

Groome and Bartlett will determine the other’s palette from a distance based on the idea of each other from memory. Using the selected palette, one artist creates circles while the other creates wigs consisting of shredded paintings. They will finish and install the work at the Kamloops Art Gallery in the final week leading up to the exhibition, and will continue with an open studio and an artist talk in the week following the opening.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by an adolescent declaration of friendship that has come to have tongue in cheek connotations and a casualness of the abbreviated “BFF” shared through text messaging. CIRCLES & WIGS was concocted from text, skype and email communication in preparation for the artists’ inaugural collaborative exhibition and continues in this manner since the artists still reside in different cities. They are poking fun at the term, but also embracing it as a link that identifies Groome and Bartlett as something more than collaborators.

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery.