who heals you pt. 1

We’re going to start with a series looking back at my first show show as the Blyth Festival Art Gallery in the fall of 2014, entitled “who heals you”.  I’m looking back in preparation for my next exhibit there coming this summer “HOW FAR I’VE FALLEN”, and hoping to maybe learn something and not repeat some of the same mistakes that preceded and followed this show (I’d rather not have another multi-year breakdown after this one).

This was the first full body of work I presented following my thesis work that was done in 2012. The first pieces from this show being done that same year. 

“surrounded by sudden inexplicable deaths, the more she pondered, the more beyond her everything seemed” india ink on paper, 2012

above:notes from the process of coming up with the show theme, and that were referred back to through out the creation of the work for the show. Some of which are still up in my studio. 

Show statement: “To light a candle, is to cast a shadow”
Ursula K. Le Guin 

 In order to create, one plays a role in destruction. To know love is to know hatred, and indifference. To label one a monster, one must label one a saint. The ability to feel pleasure comes from the ability to feel pain. For one to be oppressed, one must be an oppressor. To believe in god, one must believe in the devil. 

 Within man lies the ability to show great compassion, and the capacity to commit great acts of violence, often in an ongoing battle to govern morality. Throughout time the creation of idols and institutions have allowed for individuals to separate themselves from the role they play in oppression, and furthering the idea of an “other”. How would one make judgments of who is “right” and who is “wrong” if we were able to look past our differences ad instead relied on a belief in man.
Developing out if an intuitive process, this ongoing body of work explores relationships between technology, religion, consumerism, history, violence, hope, innocence, and human connections.

 A graduate of OCADU’s Drawing & Painting program in 2012, Stevenson’s work embraces the use of non-linear narratives and a naïve aesthetic. She views the work as a by-product of the process; attempting to understand the world we live in and how the proliferation of a black and white viewpoint as led to the increasing dehumanization of those whose faces do not directly reflect our own.

In the next post we’ll start to look closer at the process of the creation of the work that was featured in this show.