Living Room: Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Living Room

Audie Murray, Catherine Blackburn, Marcy Friesen, Carollyne Yardley, and Trace Yeomans

Oct 1 - Nov 13, 2020

Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Fazakas Gallery is pleased to present this group exhibition as an active contemplation and celebration of domiciliary practices. Living Room brings together works by artists Audie Murray, Catherine Blackburn, Carollyne Yardley, Marcy Friesen, and Trace Yeomans. In the gallery-turned-living room, the exhibition considers the global shift towards living and working in simultaneous spaces following the public health guidelines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The scale of the pandemic has created the largest collective experience in modern history. Public health measures, national lockdowns, travel restrictions, new daily protocols, economic devastation. No stone is left unturned by the innumerable effects the pandemic has and will have in the future. As we witness the seismic scale of repercussions, we've been forced by our individual experiences of introspection to slow down and meditate on the more intimate details of our lives. With an increased familiarity with our domestic spaces, the ways in which we live and work have shifted to prioritize new thoughts, scales, and materialities. 

As the discourse of contemporary cultural production, art has always prioritized conversations that center relevance. The artists in this exhibition have demonstrated such pertinence as forefronted through the legacies of Indigenous crafting techniques. Reflecting on experimental materiality and social awareness to the issues of domestic violence following stay-at-home orders, the effect on global supply chains, urbanization of natural habitats as disease-harbouring, and the woes of introspection following the bleakness of self-isolation. History is being written before us, and art has always been one of the most effective tools for studying history.