Hazel Meyer: The Weight of Inheritance

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Hazel Meyer, "The Marble in the Basement," 2019

performance documentation, 2019.

This Friday, Hazel Meyer’s exhibition The Weight of Inheritance will open to the public and will be available for view during opening hours. The history and practice of renowned artist and filmmaker, Joyce Wieland, forms its conceptual base.

In the spring of 2016, a chance encounter in Toronto’s east end led to Meyer being gifted a ton of marble that once belonged to Wieland. The marble—unremarkable domestic leftovers from a project never completed—had remained undisturbed in the house where Wieland lived until her death in 1998, by the house’s next inhabitant, Jane Rowland. The Weight of Inheritance includes new and recent sculptures and drawings, which wrestle with questions of legacy and lineage, memory and nostalgia, and how to reconcile and situate oneself in the gaps and overlaps between feminisms.

Presented together, the works also serve as a theatrical set for a performance entitled The Marble in the Basement. Though the present pandemic conditions don’t allow for a full presentation of this performance, Meyer will use the exhibition space out of hours as an occasion to develop, rehearse, and think through this performance project. In lieu of an audience, artists Alysha Seriani and S F Ho will act as witnesses by working with Meyer to produce film and writing that sit alongside this continually developing body of work.