Bodies in Conflict
Julia Rose Sutherland, P. Staff, Kiyan Williams
Visual Arts Centre
October 11 - December 15, 2021
Exhibition Text
The VAC is excited to announce our upcoming winter main gallery exhibition, Bodies in Conflict. The exhibition brings together three artistic practices that examine histories of bodily traumas associated with different ingestible substances. Through large-scale installations and video, artists will create several new site-specific installations that critically detail the historical and ongoing subjugation of historically-oppressed communities through their relationship to specific in/organic consumed materials.
Kiyan Williams’s sculptures further the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual exploration of Blackness, ecology, and trans/gressive subjectivity; wherein bodies are not fixed but in process of becoming, in states of ruination, oscillate in legibility, and blur the boundaries between self and other forms of sentient life. The artist meditates on the body as an assemblage and entanglement of many forms of matter—plant life, earth, light—enduring, transforming, decaying, and regenerating amidst social and environmental shifts.
Julia Rose Sutherland is excited to continue and develop on her ongoing Npuinu (ên·pu·i·nu) "Corpse” series that will present a large-scale installation of multiple new works. Over the course of several months, Sutherland invited local arts assistants and models to create new full-body sugar sculptures that will be present within the VAC’s ground-level galleries. The project nuances the interrelations of colonial trauma, body politics, dispossession, and belonging.
The VAC is also pleased to present P. Staff’s Weedkiller for the first time within a Canadian art exhibition. Inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s cancer memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) - in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. The work reflects on the complex relationship to one’s own suffering for health, drawing into focus how non-normative bodies exist within constant states of external and internal conflict.
