Heidi Nagtegaal, Kristi Malakoff
Guest curator: Carie Helm
Guise

in Gallery Two
5 February – 22 March 2009

Opening Reception Thursday 5 February 7:00-9:00 pm
This exhibition is accompanied by a RAG publication

The works in Guise utilize fantasy to generate alternate realities. Each artist creates idiosyncratic delineations between what is visible and what is hidden and considers the possibilities of potential or imagined lives and experiences. The craft-based, tactile aspects of their practices evoke human elements absent from many generically manufactured experiences in contemporary life. Nagtegaal knits a rainbow of facial hairpieces, exploring alternate identities. They convey a sense of comfort while prompting memory and exploring personal, gender and queer politics. The artist attempts to elevate these objects beyond reductive associations with marginalized craft histories, recalling the high art trope of the painter’s palette through her use of coloured wool. Malakoff painstakingly covers various surfaces with hand-cut images of flowers. She creates new contexts for inanimate objects, imbuing them with a sense of human presence. The cloaking of forms in her work engenders a fantastical experience, navigating between beauty and intimidation, what is real and what is revealed to be a façade.

Heidi Nagtegaal received a BFA from ECI in 2005, lives in Vancouver and has been knitting continuously for the past 4 years. She has had recent exhibitions at CSA, Zulu Records, Western Front, Centre A, and the Helen Pitt Gallery ARC. Current work centres around ideas of folk and alternative cultures, costume, identity and disguise, as well as disappearance and appearance.

Kristi Malakoff is a Berlin-based artist and a 2005 graduate of ECI in Vancouver. She has participated in artist residency programs at the Banff Centre, the Stride Gallery, Calgary, and SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland. She has exhibited in both group and solo shows throughout Canada and in England, the US and Mexico. Her work is held in private collections across Canada and the US.

Carie Helm is a practicing artist, emerging curator and former RAG Curatorial Assistant. She earned a BFA from Okanagan University College (now UBC-O) in 2000 and has organized exhibitions for the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Alternator Gallery and the Richmond Art Gallery and exhibits her own work in solo and group exhibitions throughout British Columbia.

Left (top):Kristi Malakoff, The Glade, 2006, 23,000 digitally printed images of flowers, foam core, mdf, hardware, dimensions variable

Left (bottom): Heidi Nategaal, Facial Hair Study, Quinacridone Red Light to Magenta Light Photodocumentation Collage, 2007, dimensions variable, life size, crochet