If You Prick Me, Do I Not Bleed?

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Marcy Friesen, “Oh My Heart,” 2022

digital photograph (Courtesy Fazakas Gallery)

Opening Reception January 25, 7 PM

If You Prick Me, Do I Not Bleed?: Stacey Fayant, Marcy Friesen, Melanie Monique Rose, Mindy Yan Miller & Marcus Miller, Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson

A needle pricks, pokes, and provokes. It also draws together and mends. This optimistic act of repairing defines the works, all created with needles, by the five Saskatchewan artists in this exhibition. In practices as diverse as embroidery, needle felting, beading, lacemaking, quilting and tattooing, artists Stacey Fayant, Marcy Friesen, Melanie Monique Rose, Mindy Yan Miller & Marcus Miller, and Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson invite audiences to share in experiences of otherness, pain, and healing.

The visceral image of pricking with a needle as an appeal to recognize one's suffering and humanity is both the exhibition's process and subject. When we acknowledge the painful losses of language and culture, and the violent mechanisms of colonization, genocide, and environmental destruction, we recognize the humanity of those who have experienced this hurt. More than teaching us, artworks in this exhibition ask us to feel, awakening our empathy and ability to value others as equals.

Through their stitches, artists in the exhibition invite us all to mend and heal relationships with the past, the self, others, and the environment, shaping a resilient social fabric.