Exhibition: The Artist's Studio is Her Bedroom

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Cost: Free

January 24 – April 5, 2020
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries

The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom is a sprawling group exhibition that investigates the inherited patriarchal conditions of modernism as they are particularly experienced by artists navigating critical art practices while parenting small children. Bringing works together by ten Canadian artists from across the country, the exhibition considers the often-gendered bias of these conditions, and the ways they provoke more inventive, interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of working. Through works in sculpture, ceramics, sound, video, drawing, performance, theatre and participatory installations, ten different perspectives offer strategies that provoke a reconsideration of the “magical” labour of the artist and examine the potentially generative (if difficult) possibilities of “working while working.” Their artworks explore distributive rather than accumulative models of authorship, look to alternate historical role models (such as women artists from the last century whose own practices were overlooked), improvised modes of material engagement and the normally-dismissed but potentially generative entanglement of childcare and creative work.

The exhibition’s title calls up a specific (and highly gendered) domestic context conventionally disregarded as a legitimate space for the production of serious artistic work. Rejecting this assumption, The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom asserts its generative potential, addresses parenting artists’ feelings of inadequacy and distractions, and calls for solidarity and acknowledgement of different ways of being—and making art—in the world.
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