Samantha Charette | that inescapable knowledge, in the bone

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Samantha Charette, “that inescapable knowledge, in the bone,” 2023

installation image, The Underground Gallery at Fluevog, Calgary, Alberta. (courtesy of the artist)

Reception: Saturday December 9, 2023, 4pm - 7pm

The artwork in this exhibition embodies an investigation into the intergenerational exchange of knowledge using the lens of intersectional feminist literature and the medium and history of painting.

Sourcing from lived and familial stories and knowledge, this work is both deeply personal and in tuned with a broader societal reflection on the weight of the knowledge that is intentionally and unintentionally passed between generations.

The medium and history of painting is used in a variety of ways throughout this exhibition. Some of the paintings combine artistic and gendered labour to bring the undervalued and invisible, typically female, domestic labour into the typically male dominated status, medium and history of painting. Other paintings use the history of early Canadian painting as an archive to deconstruct and reconstruct personal and familial relationships and histories through contemporary painting that embodies emotions as a source of knowledge. The newer paintings explore a personification of intergenerational trauma through the depiction of a shadowy monster that lurks in intimate and vulnerable spaces.

Through this artwork, my aim is to contribute my emotional, intellectual, and artistic labour to taking care of feminism’s archives. These paintings embody the acts of investigation and care. They are created within the context of contemporary feminist painting discourse and practices.

Artist Biography:

Samantha Charette (she/her) is a visual artist situated in Calgary, located on Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta, Canada. Charette received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Calgary. Charette is a visual artist that combines academic research with the production of art, with the goal of contributing to contemporary art discourse on interdisciplinary feminist practices. Charette is a member of the Calgary based artist collective, The Fem Assembly, and a visual art instructor at the University of Calgary and Alberta University of the Arts.