I saw the way you speak

Presented in partnership with Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts

Reception: Friday, Feb 3, 6 - 9 pm, 2023, at Platform, 100 Arthur St.

Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, Jan 7 - Feb 18, 11 am - 4 pm

I saw the way you speak is a group exhibition that observes the visual language of patterns in lens-based practices. Through the work of Alexis Dirks, Katherine Frazer, Caroline Monnet and Suzie Smith, this exhibition brings together analog and digital approaches to image-making. Patterns – designs composed of repeated imagery – shape the world around us. Similar to nature, their arrangements are integral to our everyday lives. Using photogrammetric flower arrangements, digital textiles, printmaking and collage each artist uses personal motifs to create complex visual patterns.

BIOGRAPHIES

Alexis Dirks (1982) is an image based artist living and working in Winnipeg.Her work looks at how imagery found across history books, fashion editorials, and local landscapes can be collaged into new arrangements to acquire new contextual and narrative readings when their arrangements are flattened across the photographic plane.

Alexis Dirks holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art (2009) and a BFA from the University of Manitoba (2006). She has exhibited her work in Canada, Germany, and the UK. Exhibitions and projects include collaboration with UK based collective ‘Charismatic Megafauna’ on Womxn Stage (aceartinc and performance spaces in London, UK, 2018); History Works Itself In All Directions (Blinkers, Winnipeg 2018); The Inhabitants of Space (Open Studio, Toronto 2017); Botched Fabrications on the Foggy Landscape, (aceartinc, Winnipeg 2016); Yellow Font Forest Green (G44, Toronto 2014); New New Monuments (TRUCK Contemporary, Calgary 2014). She has received awards from the Hope Scott Trust (UK), Glasgow City Council, Northwest Territories Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, Manitoba Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts.

Katherine Frazer subverts productivity applications such as Figma and Keynote (products she previously worked on as a software designer), as tools to create her digital paintings. Her IRL Ikebana (Japanese floral arrangement) practice inspires her source material: 3D scans and photos taken on her iPhone; allowing her to construct new digital flower arrangements and landscapes from captured snippets of the physical world.

Frazer’s work has been included in Rhizome’s Artbase and Museum of Crypto Art’s collection, featured in Codame Art and Tech Festival, Dazed Digital, Nylon Mag, and PAPER Magazine, with commissions for NewHive and MTV. She was invited to be one of the first fifty artists on NFT platform Foundation.

She graduated with degrees in Communication Design and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. Frazer is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. She studied Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain) before pursuing a career in visual arts and film.

Her work has been programmed internationally at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Whitney Biennial (NYC), Toronto Biennale of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal), Arsenal Contemporary (NYC), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), and the National Art Gallery (Ottawa); as well as film festivals such as TIFF, Sundance, Aesthetica (UK), Palm Springs and Cannes. In 2016, she was selected for the Cinéfondation residency in Paris. Her work is included in numerous collections including the Quebec Museum of Fine Arts, the National Art Gallery of Canada, RBC Royal Bank, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montréal. Current exhibitions include the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and a solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Monnet is recipient of the 2021 Hopper Prize, 2020 Pierre-Ayot award, the 2020 Sobey Art Award, the REVEAL Indigenous Art Awards, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from Conseil des arts de Montréal. She is based in Montreal and represented by Blouin Division Gallery.

Suzie Smith (she/her) is an artist of British and Mennonite descent who works with printmaking and design that expands into sculpture, installation and moving image. Her work often incorporates the deconstruction and transformation of objects and materials to create new or multiple meanings. Smith often creates systems and structures for her process that act as a tool to build, take apart and push against. Smith holds the position of Assistant Professor of Print Media at the University of Manitoba and is a founding member of Parameter Press.