Arts Commons Presents: Taboo Subjects Explored Through Different Artistic Mediums

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Arts Commons Window Galleries

Arts Commons Presents Visual and Media Arts

Title: Bound, ♡Hartfield Cemetery♡, Cut Out, and Newborns

Location: Window Galleries at Arts Commons (beside Max Bell Theatre)

Date: March 6 - May 28, 2017

Artist Reception: Artist reception at Happenings #8 on Mezzanine Level of Arts Commons on Monday, April 24 from 6-9 pm

CALGARY – Arts Commons is happy to welcome four contrasting artists to the Window Galleries this March. Tackling a variety of taboo and complex subjects through sculpture, textiles, photography, and mixed media, these exhibits feature artists Dayna Ellen, Felicia Hart, Jocelyn Reid, and Violet Costello using the materials of traditional craft making to talk about the challenges of motherhood, consumerism and fragility.

Bound, a series of tapestries, evokes questions about using abstract principles to communicate a feminine identity and religious faith.

♡Hartfield Cemetery♡ uses a variety of mediums to explore femininity and death, and their intersection through images of girlhood and traditionally feminine imagery.

Cut Out is a series of porcelain casts combined with 2D, gaudily-coloured window vinyl to examine the space between reality and recollection. Using sliced versions of vintage toys to represent an age passed away, Cut Out asks after the small objects we find valuable, how we love them and leave them, and whether they’re worthy of our attention when they no longer serve a purpose.

Depicting primal first moments of contact between infants and the world, Newborns seeks to capture the physical and emotional rawness of newborn babies. Wrinkled, not-yet-perfect skin, large, warped heads, wildly kicking arms and legs: these are not the cherubs of sentimental imagery. Newborns suggest an almost forbidding vulnerability, an almost incomprehensible innocence.

The Window Galleries at Arts Commons consist of seven display spaces which provide exhibition opportunities for two dimensional and sculptural works, running in three month intervals and are open to all emerging and professional artists and collectives.

Artist Biographies

Dayna Ellen was born and raised in the foothills of Calgary, Alberta. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fibre from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2014. She continues to live in Calgary with her husband and daughter.

Dayna is a multi-disciplinary artist, inspired by landscape, traditional craft, contemporary fashion, feminist discourse and Christian spirituality. With a heritage of women in craft and extending the use of contemporary digital based feminist processes, she is compelled to create work that creates a discussion space for the future of women’s identities, juxtaposing beauty with the tension of suffering.

Felicity Hart is an emerging artist who was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She graduated from the Alberta College of Art & Design is 2014, with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Print Media. Felicity has experience in printing for artists, producing commissions, and has shown works in galleries throughout southern Alberta. She works in many mediums, including watercolours, oils, etching, digital, and sculpture, producing figurative and representational works. Felicity is currently exploring themes of the taboo within her work, involving religion, femininity, feminism, and death; particularly the intersections of the taboos on femininity and representations of death.

Jocelyn Reid is a ceramic and mixed media artist from Calgary, Alberta. Reid received her Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2013, and continued on to participate in multiple international residency programs and exhibit her work throughout North America. In 2015, Reid received the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ prestigious Queens Golden Jubilee Scholarship for Visual Arts, allowing her to travel to Europe, where she was an Artist in Residence at the International Ceramic Research Centre in Skælskør, Denmark. Currently, Reid lives and works in Calgary.

Violet Costello is a sculptor working in Calgary. She has an MFA in sculpture from Concordia University, has taught at Concordia and the University of Saskatchewan, and has received awards from British Columbia Culture, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Blurring the lines between painting, sculpture and installation, her works fill gallery spaces with multiples of figures. She is inspired by the complexities of the human condition: our quirks and familiarities, our moments of loneliness and joy, the ways in which we identify and represent ourselves in and to the world.