Mandy Espezel, Sometimes we are / the edges of our skin, oil on canvas, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
BODY LONGING | MANDY ESPEZEL
26.11.2021 to 06.02.2022
Opening Reception | November 26 at 7 PM
Mandy Espezel’s site-specific painting installation engages with the lived bodily knowledge of both painter and viewer. Painters paint because they are Fleshed. Subjective experiences are received and perceived through the body, and meaning is manifested through the embodied act of vision. Seeing a painting is not accomplished only through the senses but through a bodily situation in time and place. Espezel's works resist an organizing schema, instead inviting bodies to be present in a painterly way, using eyes, mind, and body together to decipher and experience meaning.
The installation of Espezel's work is akin to a painting in space. They extend choices of colour, line, scale, and composition into the three-dimensional gallery. Each installation involves a process of allowing the exhibition context to influence visual and tactile choices. Espezel accentuates the quirks of the century-old Carnegie library gallery space for an experience that entwines vision, tactility and movement. Works are created and installed in response to the physical and luminous specificity of the gallery. Partitions are built to obscure and necessitate movement, as well as rewarding visual exploration.
A reciprocal relationship exists between the more traditional paintings on canvas and paper and the material interventions and paint applied directly to the gallery walls. The mural-like painting on the walls emerge from motifs of line, colour, and shape in the canvas and paper works to extend across the space they inhabit. Meanwhile, architectural forms conversely extend into the paintings that sit within that same space, destabilizing borders between bodies and artworks.
The title, Body Longing, in Espezel's words refers to, "a question of whether humans will mourn for a state of bodiment that we will no longer inhabit." The pandemic-stricken world accelerated the technological “de-bodying” of personal interactions enabled through video calling, messaging, scrolling, and liking. Experiences of intimacy, vulnerability, and sensuality are mediated through monetary and informational corporate exchange.
Espezel's artistic practice is an active questioning of this continual de-bodiment. For them, painting both communicates and necessitates touch and presence. It enables meaning found through a relationship with physical material and intuitive gesture. This exhibition explores the states of anxiety, desire, failure, and joy present within bodily knowledges. Espezel's work lives in the area between dichotomies, between intellect/emotion and mind/body. As French poet Paul Valéry suggests, "[the painter] takes his body with him” since the mind cannot paint on its own. Body Longing appeals to the value of lived experience and the body as a field of sense and emotion.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator
Mandy Espezel is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist originally from the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, located within Treaty 8 territory on the traditional lands of the Cree, Dene, and the unceded territory of the Métis. They received a BFA from the University of Alberta in 2007, and an MFA from the University of Lethbridge in 2012. Espezel has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies within Canada and internationally, and has received support for their work from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts. Espezel is an Instructor in the Art Department at the University of Lethbridge, and is based in Lethbridge on Treaty 7 land, in the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
Body Longing, installation view. Documentation photography by Blaine Campbell.