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Pat Aylesworth is a video artist, a painter, and a photographer, who explores the construction of identity through her lived experience as a Canadian immigrant. She is the video artist-in-residence at Crossing Communities, an arts-for-social- and-economic-development project, working with women and youth who are imprisoned or at risk of imprisonment. She is in her final year of her BFA at the University of Manitoba.
Couches have a symbolic association to home. Many rituals take place on them but when they lose their function, they are sold, given away, or disposed of. Pat Alysworth has reupholstered a series of sofas with handmade covers covered with text. She has placed them in several inner city and downtown core locations where displacement of people has occurred, or near places where laws are made leading to displacement. The words she has imprinted on the furniture refers to the physical removal of homeless people from the downtown core and the inner city, provoking questions about gentrification, who has to power to remove people from public spaces, and who is being removed from these spaces. Alysworth is troubled by the displacement of people and the repercussions of their removal. Where do the homeless go?
Much of my artwork relates to the personal, or more specifically my personal politic. It is about my healing, fixations, thoughts, analysis, deconstructions, suffocation, immobility, losses, and dysfunction. It is what I experience and what I see around me. I am a pessimist who wants to be an optimist. I am a person who is never in or out of the picture, who is always traversing the rough ride of the in-between. I am one of many out there on the margins and I want our ride to be a little less rough, somewhat meaningful, and acknowledged. It is from this place that my artwork diverges from the personal to social political realms.
Mourning for Maine, video still, 2006
Untitled, oil on pressed board, 2005
Untitled, oil on pressed board, 2005
