Barbara Adler's Autumn-Winter 2023-24
November 10, 2022 – January 10, 2023
The Cabinet | Room 4390 – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Reception: November 18, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Autumn-Winter 2023-24 is one part of a long-term, patient and incremental project that interweaves the astonishingly vegetal shapes and seasonal colours of handmade hyperbolic lace ruffles, the sounds of a logging cut close to the artist’s home on the Sunshine Coast, and synthetic fabrics sporting colour predictions for the new season. To see the tiny stitches up close you need to crouch down or even kneel. They are minute particles, at once independent and intertwined with all of the rest. Hyperbolic circles, created by introducing an extra stitch on each round, compress the silk, forcing it to buckle, ripple, and fold in on itself in uneven, unpredictable ways. Like tendrils of the wisteria, searching for more surfaces on which to grow, the humble concrescence joins the two speakers together. They confront the shimmering boa with its pistil-like microphone over the void. A performance precedes the show (Rumble Theatre) and will follow it at a future location. Through a combination of colour, textiles, and field recordings, A/W 2023-24 points to the “joyful complexity of relationships” built through forms of intensely focused, non-productive labour.
Biography
Barbara Adler is an interdisciplinary artist and performer, whose practice incorporates text, music, event making and design. She lives in xwesam, colonially known as Roberts Creek, on the unceded territories of the shíshálh and Skwxwu7mesh Nations.
Adler’s work often speaks to the fraught relationship between the labour of humans and of land, drawing parallels between human exhaustion and environmental precarity. Her recent projects use intricate textile objects to put a hitch in productivity culture, reorganizing work around relational time and seasonal cycles. She is the owner of a senior horse named ‘Monet’, who has taught her a few things, but mainly this: in mid-November, clear days are a currency beyond any other.
She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies and a BA in Art and Cultural Studies, both from Simon Fraser University.