Approaching the Edge from the Opposite Side, Sara Graham’s new exhibition at MKG127 is the result of a prolonged, active, and intensive period in the studio. Graham used this time to reflect on the breadth of her previous work, finding and exploring new directions through her ongoing preoccupation with drawing and collage. These new works developed out of a process of collecting, cutting, layering, rearranging, and repeating over and over again.
The works in the exhibition build on Graham’s previous body of public artwork in which physical screens stand between landscape and viewer, creating a complex visual pattern through the layering of perforated and cut-out spaces. The screens, placed in front of a landscape, provide viewers with an alternative and shifting perspective of the existing built environment. These works are to be looked at as much as they are to be looked ‘through’; they reveal more than they obscure. In Approaching the Edge from the Opposite Side, Graham explores how to translate these screens into a two-dimensional format.
A common element in all these new works is the attention to the edge. The edge is not seamlessly integrated or obscured but exaggerated and treated differently in both the works on paper and the photo cutouts. The edge marks the difference of each element from another, from surface and ground. The cutouts in the works on paper follow a systematic ordering on a grid while the photo cutouts are stacked in front of each other, but both are formal manipulations of a screen.
Sara Graham studied at the University of Guelph (MFA, 2006) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA, 1997). Graham has been primarily concerned with the issues and ideas of the contemporary city. Mapping has long been a central tenet of her artistic practice, and over the past several years she has created a series of diagramatic drawings and sculptural models that describe and represent urban networks, traversing that liminal space between the real and the imagined. The diagrams and narratives that she charts show her interest in mapping geographic terrains and of the plethora of systems and networks that lie beneath and behind the surfaces of everyday life. She is specifically engaged in a cross-disciplinary approach that incorporates philosophical, cultural, sociological and architectural criticism of the nature and condition of the city and city life.
Her works have been exhibited wide across Canada and have recently been featured in exhibitions at the Museum London (London), Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St John’s), MKG127 (Toronto) and Nuit Blanche (Toronto). Expected to open in 2024, Sara was commissioned to create the facade for the Energy Complex Building at the Canadian Port of Entry which is part of the Gordie Howe International Bridge Project between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan.