Erica Stocking at Artspeak, Vancouver

I heard someone looking from the street exclaim “Woah!” but I couldn’t successfully beckon him inside. The striking objects in Erica Stocking’s solo-exhibition at Artspeak are shapes and silhouettes referenced from the artist’s family video footage taken over a period of six months. Clothes are the choice referent, but other excerpts include an oven mitt, carrot shavings, daisies, and a Christmas morning fort. In place of plinths, Stocking has customized cylinder pedestals that suit the scale of each sculpture. Everything is made of canvas, sewn together, and stiffened to imply volume or hold a pose.



Erica Stocking

But how can a pose be made without a body? Fishing line. Articles suspended with the transparent string appear to be standing without a wearer, creating striking negative spaces to imagine the bodies or limbs. A moment of weirdness passes when you remember that the ghost limbs you’ve conjured inhabited garments that starred in Stocking’s home life. Morning is a fragment of a pale blue sleeve suspended high in the air. Its angle implies an outstretched arm that might accompany a hearty yawn; the colour summons pajamas but the memory is inaccessible. Stocking’s titles are generous to interpretation (two pairs of shed underwear are respectively titled Christmas Morning and Hail the New Puritan). Others are pure description, such as Towel Turban and Found in a closet of an old Kitsilano Home. A grandmother passed, a friend moved away. You look like Frumpy Peggy Olsen. A chance taken. Tossed on the edge of the nursing chair. Stocking’s precise and flat application of pigment to translate textiles should not be a mere footnote of the exhibition. These elegantly manipulated forms are likely to be initially understood as sculpture, but the entire exhibition is essentially paint on canvas.


Artspeak: http://artspeak.ca/
Erica Stocking continues until July 25.


Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.