MKG127 is very excited to present Feedback Loop, a group exhibition including work by Dave Dyment, Rachel Crummey, Tina Guo, Soledad Muñoz, Devon Pryce, and Josi Smit.
February 17 – March 18, 2023
Opening February 17, 5 – 8PM
Featuring a collection of painting, sculpture, and experimental media, Feedback Loop presents works that explore how resonance takes place across the divide of individual experience. Our ability to send and receive information-laden cues extends beyond linguistic articulation, into a space of intuition. The artworks in this exhibition characterize these moments of connection and communion, and the reverberations of affect across individual bodies, spaces, and times.
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Woven with copper and cotton, Soledad Muñoz’s Desgarro responds to the movements of gallery visitors. Sound enters our bodies, influencing our nervous and circulatory systems. With this work we return the favour, directing the output of Munoz’s sculptural work. The designs woven into the pieces reference climate crisis in relation to geographically wide ranging points of influence: inspired by images of an iceberg separating in Chile, it is a reminder of the Canadian government’s role as an agent of political destabilization, environmental destruction, and exploitation of the global south.
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Emerging from an ongoing research project investigating Fungi as living intelligence through collaborative practice, Rachel Crummey’s works utilize patterns representing the connective becoming associated with mycelium and rhizomatic growth.
In Crummey’s words: “The titles Hypersea and Anastomosis come from Lynn Margulis “Symbiotic Planet.” Margulis defines symbiosis as “the living together of very different kinds of organisms.” She argues that evolution arises from the living together and eventual merging of different organisms and that this is a non-linear process. The tree of life is actually more of a bramble, with branches growing in on themselves and sometimes fusing. The fusing of two things that are normally branching or diverging is called anastomosis. Hypersea is a term that comes from evolutionary biologist’s attempts to understand the origins of life on land over 450 million years ago, a story grounded in the intimacy of plants and fungus. Glomeromycota refers to a phylum of fungi that likely made the evolution of plants on land possible.”
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Tina Guo paints through a surreal and erotic lens interested in how our bodies transform into interchanging vessels that carry one another and the environment at large. In these paintings we see consciousness emerging from a shared root, a bouquet where those branching off are still drawn to one another; playing, whispering, touching tongues, and weaving patterns with their collective forms.
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In Dave Dyment’s Untitled (Headset), a pair of headphones have been altered so that one earpiece becomes a microphone, creating a continuous loop. The headset hangs, humming slightly against the gallery wall. When worn, the signal is interrupted. In the words of Dyment, “The silence serves as a blunt metaphor for the inability to understand infinity (your head gets in the way).”
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Josi Smit’s lightboxes preserve visuals collaged with personal family photographs documenting her mother’s experience of the disco scene in Ottawa and Hull. With its mythical promise of boundary and identity dissolution on the dancefloor, disco speaks to reaching for communion through the pleasures of music, gathering, and repetition. While the reality of nightlife can involve harsh aspects: physically punishing activity, as well as substance use and abuse, these works point to nostalgia, memory, and desire as information for wayfinding.
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On the south wall of the gallery, Devon Pryce’s Stethescopes depicts two figures linked in mirrored actions. Inspired by memories of the childhood experience of attempting to listen to your own heartbeat, Pryce has extrapolated this game into a shared one, representing a communal experience of physical intimacy.
Artist Biographies
Dave Dyment
Based in Sackville, NB, Dave Dyment’s practice includes audio, video, photography, performance, writing and curating, and the production of artists’ books and multiples. His work mines pop culture for shared associations and alternate meanings, investigating the language and grammar of music, cinema, television and literature, in order to arrive at a kind a folk taxonomy of a shared popular vocabulary. Past projects include a 100-year old whisky, homemade LSD, a string quartet performing the Beatles’ song A Hard Day’s Night slowed to last twelve hours, and a video work condensing every known disaster film down to the moments of the destruction and arranging them geographically across twenty monitors.
Dyment’s work has exhibited across the country, as well as New York City, Philadelphia, London, and Dublin and sits in many private and corporate collections including BMO and RBC, and in the libraries of the AGO and National Gallery of Canada. Examples of his work can be seen at www.davedyment.com or heard on the YYZ Anthology Aural Cultures or the Art Metropole disk New Life After Fire, a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.
Rachel Crummey is a visual artist, writer, and educator of settler descent based in Tkaronto. Her work has been published in the Puritan, Maisonneuve, and the Capilano Review; she has exhibited in Canada, the UK, Austria and Italy. She is currently at work on a research project “Sympoeisis // Fruiting Bodies” (with artist Tara Dougans) which explores non-linear, more than human intelligences through collaboration with Ganoderma Lucidum (Reishi, a medicinal mushroom). She wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
Tina Min Jia Guo (b. 2001, Ürümqi, China) is an artist and writer. They live between Berlin and Toronto. Through painting and writing, they approach narratives of migration and adaptation through a surreal, metamorphic lens. Their paintings depict the necessity to fill and be filled—eating, dwelling, burying, fucking — how bodies transform into interchanging vessels that carry one another and the environment at large. Their work begs the question: how far can the body stretch?
Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Currently based in Toronto, her work seeks to explore the analogy between the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit, and an embodied experience of sound.
In 2014, she started Genero, an audio project/label that focuses on the distribution and greater representation of women and non-binary artists in the sound realm. Subsequently in 2017, she co-founded CURRENT “Feminist Electronic Art Symposium”, a multidisciplinary, intersectional music and electronic art symposium working with women, non-binary, and BIPOC artists in Vancouver and beyond.
She understands the woven structure as the continuation of our social gesture, where a thread cannot sustain itself in space, nor can two of them. It is a community of interconnected threads that creates material and the relationships between them that create space. Therefore, most of her work is based on the relationship of the woven structure with sound, and the interconnected ever-changing spaces that they create.
Soledad was the recipient of New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Craft and Design, and The Emily Carr President’s Media Award – Installation/Interactive Media.
Devon Pryce is an artist currently based in Toronto. He completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University. Devon’s work incorporates painting, digital concepts, and cinematic themes. His work explores issues of anxiety, the mundane and displacement. Devon is interested in the mechanisms humans use to manipulate their surroundings, and the influence that those measures have on the psyche. His paintings involve experimental renderings of people, places and objects that carry cognitive weight, and are rendered using a thin application of oil paint that allows for an atmospheric and watery quality in the painting. By a process that often crosses digital media with oil painting, the narrative subject matter exists in a balanced space between fabrication and reality.
Josi Smit is an artist and writer who works in sculpture, installation, photography, and text. Smit’s work considers how nostalgia and desire orient us, the intimacies we form with objects and spaces, and how subversion can emerge from tenderness and fantasy. They hold a BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCAD University, and have exhibited at Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto; Angell Gallery, Toronto; Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto; The Roundtable Residency, Toronto; and Art Mûr, Montreal. Her current projects, which engage 1970s disco as both a cultural movement and a family heritage, have been produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
The exhibition continues until March 18, 2023
Masks are appreciated in the gallery. If you are feeling unwell, or are exhibiting any symptoms of Covid-19, please refrain from visiting the gallery. Thank you for your cooperation.