Tammi Campbell: Dear Agnes
to
Esker Foundation 444-1011 9 Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0H7
Tammi Campbell, "Dear Agnes," July 31, 2016
detail. Private Collection
Dear Agnes is a series of visual letters that serve as Tammi Campbell’s wordless communion with Saskatchewan-born modernist artist Agnes Martin. Beginning in 2010, Campbell would start each day in her Saskatoon studio by drawing a different variation of a grid in graphite on Japanese rag paper. Campbell would then write the salutation “Dear Agnes” in the top left corner, fold the drawing twice like a letter, and then store it in sequence. Campbell completed her last letter to Martin on 31 December 2017. This near-daily practice has led to over 1,000 drawings, the final three months of which will be on view at Esker.
The duration of this sustained ritual mirrors Agnes Martin’s mid-career hiatus from artistic practice, a period that ended with On a Clear Day, a portfolio of thirty silkscreen prints on Japanese rag which visually manifest the varied permutations of the grid. Dear Agnes is reflective of Campbell’s homage to Agnes Martin, her ongoing dialogue with the aesthetic legacies of modernism, and her meditation on silence, ritual, and repetition within artistic praxis.