Past Exhibition

Art on Demand 4.3

Artist Sarah Wright and Curated by Kate Petrusa
Sep 27, 2018
to
Nov 10, 2018
EXHIBITION

Crowded streets, sanitation struggles, vibrant colour, and constant din have characterized the experience of public, urban space for thousands of years, all over the world. While the experience of cities is in some ways universal, our understanding of the way urban spaces work (on us and for us) has changed dramatically over time. In her recent project called How to Fold a Box, emerging artist Sarah Wright looks particularly at the cyclical and systemic power inequality that exists in modern urban settings, and explores how it might be possible to equalize that imbalance.

Wright developed How to Fold a Box by using humble materials and found objects from the city streets to create a series of collaged and hand-drawn vignettes. Taking cues from comics and street art, and often incorporating elements of garbage, Wright’s colourful vignettes reflect stories the artist has gathered from vibrant individuals. The impetus for this project came from a summer that Wright spent working in a soup kitchen in London, Ontario. Each vignette functions as an abstract representation of one of Wright’s clients from the soup kitchen, which she then “maps” onto the walls of the gallery space to indicate the locations where personal stories or events unfolded. The pre-fabricated box templates that function as the structural support for each vignette is suggestive of the push and pull between how we all affect and create space, and the social structures that limit our ability to create or reimagine space differently.

How to Fold a Box calls attention to the way public, urban space is shared with and experienced by those who are so often hidden or marginalized in specific neighbourhoods. By making visible the difficult stories that are often supressed in our communities, Wright encourages viewers to consider how we might share space differently.

The Reach Art on Demand 4.3 Monograph

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