Vancouver Exhibition: A Handmade Night

It has been an incredible past few weeks since the opening of my exhibition A Handmade Night at Ian Tan Gallery.  My heart was so full seeing friends from my personal life, from my work and my art life all come together at my opening. I am so grateful that everyone has been so receptive to my new work and for the opportunity to chat with Galleries West about my show. It’s hard to know how all the pieces will end up looking up against one another when I have my head down working to finish whatever I can. Things often shift into a different direction than from what I started from. I can not thank everyone enough who showed interest in my work. You can see more photos from my installed show here.

The most challenging part for me was planning the installation of two wall sculptures. I wanted to continue to push painting into the three dimensional space and build on the sculptural installation that I had created last year for my show in New York.  I don’t consider myself a sculptor but I wanted to see what I could do. I decided to experiment with Tyvek because it was a lighter material than canvas and acted a lot more like paper at the same time. It also reminded me of a large paint skin which was the original impetus for this exploration. With all the layers of paint the sheet of Tyvek was much heavier than I expected. In working with my test pieces, I was also surprised at how much memory the material had. I held back manipulating the painted Tyvek too much in fear of over-working the shape.

Even with reassurance from my artist friends–which I could not have made it through without their support–I couldn’t really know how the sculptures would end up until the day of the installation. All I could do was try to understand the material and try different variations of installing the test sculpture in my studio.  I had several sleepless nights leading up to the installation day. I was lucky that my studio mate Tristesse Seeliger was available to help me install as it definitely required extra hands. Overall, I am so glad that I pushed through the fear.  I feel that these pieces are some of the most interesting work that I have been able to make so far and am still astonished that I made it happen. I actually made a third sculpture to install but I was too tired to put it together. So you might see it up another time in the future. It’s a great feeling to be able to finally share all my new work with everyone and really take a step a back to enjoy what I’ve accomplished in about seven months while working around my day job. I have so many ideas and hope I can continue to experiment more this year.