Anne Low: Figure Like Hearse

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Anne Low, "Taffy," 2020

detail, image courtesy the artist.

The passivity of furnishing is deceptively complex. A table, a chair, and a cupboard each await and receive gesture differently. We are not always able to discern whether our body’s customs shape furnishing or if it is furnishing that shapes our bodies, and this blurring of the direction of volition or relation is where intuition locates itself. An item of furniture is a kind of preposition. “By,” “with,” and “of” are material intuitions. Of is a cupboard. With is a table. By is a chair.  — “Atget’s Interiors”, p. 203, The Office of Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson 

Seeing the transition of material into another state of being, Anne Low has created a series of commemorative new works which anticipate the various in-between states that a work inhabits, as a part of its making: coming into form, storage, transportation, rest. Many of the works will travel packed inside another, where the container for the artworks is also hand- made while carefully considered as an equivalent form, stuffed with hay and handwoven fabric salvage. Upon the conclusion of a crating structures’ necessary duty, rather than becoming excluded from its utilitarian function, these containers will be then utilized as the platforms for, and around, the work as a part of the exhibition. In this way, there is no separation from the skilled handcrafting by bodies from the structures which carry, support, and unveil an artwork in readiness for its intended public life. The physical structures which connect and protect are conditional and have an equivalent set of conditions in the creation of their form, from design to production, for the supported interior body of work to be able to live and perform. 

At a time when we can see how small and simple salvage fabrics can filter unseen viral and microscopic bacteria, which can otherwise cause devastating impacts on human and associated systems of survival, it becomes clear how modest gestures of care can protect an invisible mass. It is a material indication of how easily supply chains of transport from packaging are linked to the hands that hold and move every object required in our quotidian spaces; how essential a seed is and the equivalent attention necessary to protect the elements that feed it. This collection of new work is a lament for an awareness of our finite embodiment, and our co-dependency within the necessary structures of care which connect us. 

Anne Low’s detailed historical research into the methodologies of traditional functional practices, such as weaving, woodworking, paper making and other highly skilled applications, are employed with her specific choices in custom object-making laden with potent narrative. Her complex installation of interior furnishings, architectures and design, are embedded with their historical attributes and where the characteristics of apparently plain, modest and quotidian objects can be seen with the strength, worthiness and value deserving of each individual form. 

Curated by Kristy Trinier

Anne Low uses sculpture, installation, textiles and printmaking to investigate how forms can detach themselves from their historical context and speak to contemporary subjects such as the domestic and the decorative. Through the production of mysterious contemporary forms, her work examines broader narratives surrounding the impulse to individuate object and self, and how the desire to decorate is expressed in the surfaces of domestic interiors and objects. Recent solo exhibitions include Chair for a woman (Vancouver), Paperstainer (Toronto), and A wall as a table with candlestick legs (Stockholm). Recent group exhibitions include Soon Enough – Art in Action (Stockholm) and Clive Hodgson & Anne Low (London, U.K.). Her collaboration with Evan Calder Williams — The Fine Line of Deviation — has been exhibited at Forum Expanded (Berlin), Mercer Union (Toronto), and ISSUE Project Room (New York City).