The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom

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Courtesy the artist

Erica Stocking, "The Artist’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life," 2014.

mixed media

Exhibition extended with re-opening of the gallery.

The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom is a group exhibition that investigates the patriarchal conditions inherited from modernism, particularly as they have informed assumptions about how and where “serious” artwork gets produced. Through works in sculpture, ceramics, sound, video, drawing, performance and participatory installations, it shares the perspectives of ten Canadian artists whose practices are especially attentive to the temporal and spatial constraints that structure their creative work. In differing ways, these works address the numerous other labours—physical, emotional, reproductive or otherwise—that are often inextricable from artistic production. They challenge myths of the “magical” labour of the artist and explore alternate models of authorship, including the (often involuntarily) entanglement of childcare and creative work. They ask how we draw strength from (or entirely resist) our artistic and political inheritances, and seek out alternate role models—such as women-identifying artists from the last century whose own practices were marginalized— to build and sustain community.

The exhibition’s title, borrowed from Erica Stocking’s work of the same name that forms a central pivot point in the show, calls up a specific (and highly gendered) domestic context conventionally disregarded as a legitimate space for the production of artistic work. Rejecting this assumption, The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom asserts its generative potential, addresses artists’ feelings of inadequacy and distractions, and calls for acknowledgement of and solidarity in different ways of being—and making art—in the world.