Sutures
Eve Tagny & Emii Alrai
July 3 - September 4, 2022
Ontario Arts Council Winner for Exhibition of the Year Over $20,000
Co-curated by Matthew Kyba and Megan Kammerer
The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) is pleased to announce the participation of Eve Tagny (Montréal, QC) and Emii Alrai (Leeds, UK) in thier inaugural international residency and site-specific duo installation beginning Summer 2022.
Tagny + Alrai come together after months of digital collaboration to disrupt traditional installation making at the VAC. Both artists look at investigating how non-Western cultures represent trauma through landscape and artifacts, harmonizing their interests in the gallery’s physical space.
Tagny + Alrai travelled to Clarington in June 2022 for a one-month residency onsite at the VAC. Through site research at local garden sites, historical venues within the region, and epxloring regional iconography, the pair will examine how monuments propagate territorial statehood and settlement in the Durham Region. Artists will experiment in ceramic hand building, film making, and video projection to create multidisciplinary installations that blur the line between each individual practice. Thus the artists’ work during this period of free play and experimentation will embody conscious contemplation through site-specific installation within the gallery’s exhibition spaces.
The coalescing exhibition Sutures opens on Sunday, July 3 running through September 4, 2022. After injury, a suture makes you whole. Its scar, though rough or imperfect, signifies a healing. This transformative process is not unlike Alrai + Tagny’s production as the artists negotiate themes of reflection, healing, and physical reconnection. As China Miéville writes, “Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.” We look forward to welcoming our community members back after two years of remote summer programming for a new period of reconnection and renewal at the VAC.
Informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity, and post-colonial museum practices of collecting/displaying objects, Alrai weaves together historical narratives by forging artifacts and visualizing residues of cultural collision. Her work contains elements which are broken or unfinished and hover between the formal polish of an imperial museum, archaeological dig, or the residue of a performance. Alrai questions the value and origin of artifacts, while navigating diasporic experiences.
Tagny focuses on how communities at the margins commit to living, rather than merely surviving through a lens-based installation practice. She centers garden spaces to mend traumatic disruptions in accordance with nature. She investigates these man-made sanctuaries that simultaneously encompass all stages of the living—from luscious growth to decay—to engage in processes of renewal, reconnection, and transformation.
Eve Tagny (b. 1986, Montréal, Québec, Canada) weaves lens-based mediums, installation, text, and performance, to explore spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory — inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies.
Tagny earned her BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from the University of Montréal. She is included in the 2021 Momenta Biennale, and has previously exhibited at Visual Arts Centre, Clarington; Optica (forthcoming), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Centre Clark, Montréal; Musée du Bas- Saint-Laurent, Rivière -du-Loup (Quebec); Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Québec; Cooper Cole, Franz Kaka, Gallery 44, Toronto; Platform, Winnipeg; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and nGbK, Berlin among others. She is the recipient of the the 2020 Plein Sud Bursary, the 2018 Mfon grant, and has been shortlisted for the 2018 CAP Prize, the 2018 Burtynsky Photobook Grant, and the 2020 OAAG Award. Tagny lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Emii Alrai (b.1993, Blackpool) is an artist based in Leeds. Alrai’s practice is informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity and post-colonial museum practices of collecting and displaying objects. Focusing on the ancient mythologies from the Middle East alongside personal oral histories of Iraq, Alrai weaves together narratives by forging artefacts and visualising residues of cultural collision. Drawing references from objects in museum collections, ancient writing from the Middle East and cultural memories, her work questions the value and origins of artefacts, as well as navigating the experience of diaspora.
She studied her BA in Fine Art and an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at The University of Leeds. In 2020, she undertook a residency in Calabria with In-ruins, Italy, and was selected for the Triangle Asterides Residency, Marseille. In 2019, she participated in the Arab British Centre Making Marks Project in Kuwait and the 2018 Tetley Artist Associate Programme. Upcoming and Recent group and solo exhibitions include: Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2022), Visual Arts Centre, Clarington, Canada (2021), Threshold, Leeds, UK (2021), Jerwood Arts, London, UK (2021), The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2020); VITRINE, London (2019), Fallow, Rectory Projects (2019), Two Queens, Leicester, UK (2019); GLOAM, Sheffield, UK (2018); (2018); Caustic Casual, Salford, UK (2017); Hutt Collective, Nottingham, UK (2017). Blackpool)
