Struts Gallery

" My practice is conceptually based and I work across a variety of processes and mediums as needed. These include painting, drawing, photography, plastic transfers, sewing, stencil graffiti, digital projections, mixed media, and ready-mades. My projects typically explore the politics of taste, class, and art. This tendency is best evidenced by my continuing use of material such as used linoleum, which bears histories of pattern, taste and domestic labour. Discomfort with the nexus of art, power, and knowledge leaves me keen to undermine art as a sphere remote from those without the requisite privileges for access. My artwork often displays concern with its own assumption of cultural value. As a prestigious realm of knowledge and culture, I see art functioning in part to legitimate and perpetuate uneven distributions of cultural power and authority. I am especially interested in the gender dimension to these politics.

A concern with ascribed hierarchies of cultural value is manifest in my reconfiguration of quotidian, outdated, and discarded media. I seek to connect viewers to social and cultural stratification through the use of socio-historically laden materials such as linoleum, used t-shirts, plywood, wood panelling, family archives, and found snapshots. My practice often registers the potential for critical autonomy outside the realm of elite art. Here I investigate how leisurely modes of insight outside bourgeois categories of competence, and value may harbour disalienating potential through a general will to knowledge, self-representation, and creativity. I strive to nuance my considerations rather than reassert a dichotomy between high and the low taste. Many of my projects extend the notion of art as an everyday category of experience and popular practice in radical disalignment with consumer culture. I often re-valuate media in order to highlight certain quotidian experiences and practices as potential sites of consciousness-raising, if only as a reconfiguration of unwanted material bearing the broken utopian promise of the commodity."


EXHIBITIONS:

Heather Passmore Mis-Takes January 18 - February 16, 2007 opening reception Friday, January 18, 8:00pm

" My practice is conceptually based and I work across a variety of processes and mediums as needed. These include painting, drawing, photography, plastic transfers, sewing, stencil graffiti, digital projections, mixed media, and ready-mades. My projects typically explore the politics of taste, class, and art. This tendency is best evidenced by my continuing use of material such as used linoleum, which bears histories of pattern, taste and domestic labour. Discomfort with the nexus of art, power, and knowledge leaves me keen to undermine art as a sphere remote from those without the requisite privileges for access. My artwork often displays concern with its own assumption of cultural value. As a prestigious realm of knowledge and culture, I see art functioning in part to legitimate and perpetuate uneven distributions of cultural power and authority. I am especially interested in the gender dimension to these politics. A concern with ascribed hierarchies of cultural value is manifest in my reconfiguration of quotidian, outdated, and discarded media. I seek to connect viewers to social and cultural stratification through the use of socio-historically laden materials such as linoleum, used t-shirts, plywood, wood panelling, family archives, and found snapshots. My practice often registers the potential for critical autonomy outside the realm of elite art. Here I investigate how leisurely modes of insight outside bourgeois categories of competence, and value may harbour disalienating potential through a general will to knowledge, self-representation, and creativity. I strive to nuance my considerations rather than reassert a dichotomy between high and the low taste. Many of my projects extend the notion of art as an everyday category of experience and popular practice in radical disalignment with consumer culture. I often re-valuate media in order to highlight certain quotidian experiences and practices as potential sites of consciousness-raising, if only as a reconfiguration of unwanted material bearing the broken utopian promise of the commodity." - Heather Passmore www.heatherpassmore.com

BACK TO EXHIBITIONS 2008