Soft Bodied Oddities, with Corri-Lynn Tetz at Jarvis Hall Gallery, Calgary, AB, November 22, 2019- January 18, 2020

Jarvis Hall Gallery would like to invite you to the opening reception of our latest exhibition featuring powerful new work by Laura Findlay and Corri-Lynn Tetz in the exhibition Soft Bodied Oddities. Findlay and Tetz each begin their process for the painted image form a different point of departure. Broadly, the exhibition explores the theme of empowerment: on the one hand through the re-embodiment of the female form within a painted context, while on the other the radical movement through understanding and learning about loss.

For Corri-Lynn Tetz, the paintings explore the empowerment of women in their own skin, owning their sexuality. The source imagery for this series originates with pornographic magazines from the 1980s. As the figures appear to dematerialize on the substrate of the canvas, they are imbued with a power as they reconfigure the gaze that was cast upon them. 

Laura Findlay moves through a divergent form of empowerment. A personal narrative emerges through the viewer’s careful study of the work. Findlay examines an embedded sensibility concerning the radical side of loss through this series of portraits of flowers. Her work, the palette and aesthetic dark, comments subtly on this theme. The flowers pictured are presented as a bouquet of oddities: the pistils of a selection of flowers appear mutated, affected by what is called “Fascination” – a condition which “makes the flower tip elongated and ribbon like.” Visages appear and recede; flowers fall from the heavens or stand tall against a sun streaked sky. They do not act as we expect flowers to, as women do not act as society expects them to: mourning is not a private endeavour and this series welcomes this act into the public sphere.

Together the work in Soft Bodied Oddities demands that the viewer reconsider the roles women have been obliged to place themselves in throughout their lives.