A. Branch, Sena Cleave, and Vitória Monteiro | I have forgotten my umbrella

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Sena Cleave, "Futon or the Quilt"

video, 4:40 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 17, 2022 6-8pm

Monica Reyes Gallery is pleased to present I have forgotten my umbrella, an exhibition by local emerging artists A. Branch, Sena Cleave, and Vitória Monteiro.

Branch, Cleave and Montiero work in various mediums such as textile, print, sculpture, and video to blur the boundaries between image and text. Each artist addresses sites of knowledge, ranging from archives and books to less evident everyday sources, and reimagines instances of knowledge production such as reading, writing, and translation in relation to states of legibility, transparency, and obscurity.

The exhibition takes its name from a fragment of text found by Jacques Derrida amongst Friedrich Nietzsche’s unpublished papers. In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Derrida describes this discovery as a possible citation, a “modestly enfolded phallus,” and a cryptic finite code.1

About the artists:

A. Branch is a text and textile based artist whose main interest is in the examination of text’s readability and legibility in relation to an idea of queerness. Their work is theory-driven and has been influenced by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Alexander García Düttmann, and Pleshette DeArmitt. Branch is primarily focused on an exploration of subject positions whose relationship to texts are expressed through unsayable, hesitant, or inarticulate modes of writing and reading. Their work often deploys anagrams, quilting, psychic photography, and print media. They are a member of the publishing collective Cat and the Rat. Branch received their BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University in 2020 and has exhibited their work in: Scent Trails, in The Couch Space as part of the exhibition Collecting Plum Blossoms at the Audain Gallery (2021); Are We All We Are: BFA Graduating Exhibition, Audain Gallery (2020); Small File Media Festival, Simon Fraser University (2020); and Artists Who Do Book Tables, Simon Fraser University (2019).

Sena Cleave’s art practice addresses the ways images and texts fabricate ideas of femininity, language, and originality or authorship. They engage with processes that allow them to translate across artistic disciplines, such as weaving, video, and photographic image making, as well as quoting and rearranging found text. Often, they pilfer matter from everyday life and repurpose it to point at the gap between the felt experiences of our bodies and the ways that bodies are represented or reflected back to us. The found matter generates something that resembles a whole: one that is jumbled and misbehaving. In 2022 Cleave, alongside Debbie C., was awarded the Contemporary Art Gallery Residency Prize for their collaborative project The Couch Space. Their work has been included in recent exhibitions such as: Inverted Pyramid Series: Intend to Upend, James Black Gallery (2022); Digital Interventions Part 2: Mediating Vessels, Massy Arts Society (2022); and Collecting Plum Blossoms: BFA Graduating Exhibition, Audain Gallery (2021).

Vitória Monteiro is a Brazilian Canadian artist who explores the intricacies of language abstraction and the reprocessing of information. Monteiro works in paper-making, sculpture, and performance to navigate various sites that knowledge inhabits. Their works embody themes of dislocation, translation, indexicality, and citation, and is rooted in reflections of being neurodivergent. Monteiro holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Simon Fraser University. Their recent and upcoming exhibitions include: To Fold; To Fault, CityScape Community ArtSpace (2023), Just Out of Reach, The Couch Space as part of Unit/Pitt’s Wrong Wave Festival (2022); Digital Interventions Part 2: Mediating Vessels, Massy Art Gallery (2022); SUPERCHARGED, BFA Graduation Exhibition, Audain Gallery (2021), Creative Reuse: The Art of Upcycling, Langley Centennial Museum & Exhibition Center (2021). In 2021 Monteiro received the Contemporary Art Gallery Residency Prize.​

1 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1979) 123-143.