Kristi Malakoff, Moon Dog, 2004, 8000 pegs of acrylic rod, plywood, lights, and hardware, photo by David M. C. Miller and Petra Mala Miller
THE CIRCUS AND THE WISHING WELL | KRISTI MALAKOFF
06.27.2009 | 09.13.2009
Malakoff sees her practice as exploring two sides of the same coin and the space in between. Balancing awe and intimidation, she creates work signaling elements of carnival while approaching notions of the sublime, and on occasion, the grotesque. Works like Resting Swarm (2008) present no less than 21,000 life-sized photographic cutouts of bees pinned tightly into a hive formation in the corner of the gallery; teeming with vitality, the viewer is simultaneously seduced and repelled by its raw beauty and threatening uncertainty. Like the circus or the carnival the work evokes spectacle, the “flash”, the big and the bold, but also the representation of the present or the “real”. Malakoff is persistent in her search for this present-ness, a profoundly affective and embodied experience. At the same time, she fractures this reality with something more discrete, nuanced and hopeful. Like the wishing well, her work hints at secret worlds of fantasy and ephemerality - worlds that linger in the past or in dreams of the future, what could have been and what should be. In this way, Malakoff’s work becomes an occasion to externalize our desires – a transgressive celebration that reveals undertones of social critique calling to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on the Carnival:
As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.
Malakoff will be installing a number of works that examine opposing yet connected relationships, or “soft dichotomies” in her own words. In addition to works drawn from her earlier practice, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery will be premiering a selection of new works, among them a group of miniature dioramas constructed from her personal credit cards. These romps with scale, from the gigantic to the miniscule, remain a fundamental strategy employed by Malakoff in works such as Speisepilze/Giftpilze (Fairy Ring) (2008) – a delicate field of myriad mushrooms, toadstools, grasses and leaves all cut from 32 German stamps of the GDR regime. Tiny scenes like these demand a shift in our perception, stoking the imagination and inviting the spectator to lose oneself, or simply put, to play. In effect, her miniatures become “a metaphor for interior space and time” as noted by Susan Stewart in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. When Malakoff combines the miniature with the gigantic in works such as The Glade (2006), an ambitious installation of full-scale fairytale creatures constructed of more than 23,000 cut-out paper flowers, the result is powerfully seductive; the viewer being immersed both physically and psychologically. Conflating the circus and the wishing well, she is able to generate enchanting work that lives between worlds, neither relegated entirely to our internal hopes and desires, nor to a saccharine and fabricated external world of spectacle.
Kristi Malakoff is a Canadian visual artist, exhibiting on an international scale, who has recently returned to Canada after time spent living abroad. She is a 2005 BFA graduate of the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver where she was the recipient of many awards and scholarships, among them the Alvin Balkind Memorial Scholarship, the Helen Pitt Award and the Governor General’s silver medal for the top Emily Carr Institute graduating student of 2005. Since graduating, she has participated in artist residency programs at the Banff Centre and SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland. She has exhibited in both group and solo shows throughout Canada and in England, the US, Germany and Mexico. Her work has been featured and reviewed in many Canadian newspapers, journals and arts-related magazines, and is held in private and corporate collections across Canada and the US.
Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and curated by Ryan Doherty. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge.
