Jeremy Laing

Work

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PieceworkRobert McLaughlin Gallery
April 1 to September 3, 2023 Curated by Leila Timmins, featuring work by Hangama Amiri, Alicia Barbieri, Colleen Heslin, Jeremy Laing, Preston Pavlis, Jagdeep Raina, Moraa Stump, Judith Tinkl, Joyce Wieland, and Alice Olsen Williams.

Using the materiality of quilt making as a metaphor for how the fabric of the world holds together, this exhibition brings together a group of contemporary artists who use textiles and assemblage as world-building tools. Pulling together the seemingly discarded, quilts are a composition of scraps, held together with the intention of offering warmth and comfort. This process of building something new from what was left behind, offers an orientation for engagement and opens possibilities for what can become. Quilts also occupy a set of social relations, where the making and sharing is often intergenerational and collective. They are meant to be passed down and cherished, appreciating in value through use.

Starting from a material approach, this exhibition is maximalist in form, weaving together the different ways that artists have picked up quilting as both metaphor and formal strategy in their work. Taken together, the exhibition forms a patchwork of ideas and objects, centering materiality and sensuousness as a ground for the various approaches and intentions within the works.Jeremy Laing’s recent sculptural installations form provisional spaces for gathering and reimagining. Here, a structure of scaffolding is covered in cascading layers of fabric. Informed by quilt-making as an index of social relationships, the materials hold the residue of past gatherings, events and uses, with their visual traces, subtle grass stains, shoe marks and areas of wear forming a collage of intimacies.

Taken together, the work seeks to reveal the construction of identity, built through layers of experiences and material conditions. Each cloth is dyed with a unique combination of three overlapping pigments, creating various combinations and spectral possibilities that offer permeability and unfixedness. Contrasting the sensuous draping and delicate porousness of the material, the rigid structure of the armature mirrors the grid of the fabric’s warp and weft. However, as areas of threads start to pull apart and loosen, and as the fabrics flutter in the breeze, light from within becomes more visible, suggesting a possibility of collective liberation from the rigid arrangements of identity as we know them.

—Leila TimminsThis project was supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Research Creation grant. Piecework was presented in partnership with Images Festival.

Documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid.

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