The concept of "precarity" connotes both the positive state of ultimate freedom and individuality as well as the negative lack of stability, security, or grounding in community. But as others have noted, while the term receives a special fluency in today's world of untenable economies and atomistic social networks, precariousness of resources and social affinities has been with us long before climate change, financial collapses, and neo-liberalism.
Brenda Draney
2009 RBC Painting Competition winner Brenda Draney speaks to an awareness of precarity in her wall text for Suspend on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta: "After the fire in my town, some people camped where they could. If they had a summer cabin, they stayed there. If not, some of them stayed in tents." The image of the tent as motif for transience resonates also as metaphor for the materiality and function of painting – both are suspended fabric structures that isolate visual fields from the rest of the world, wherein "sounds were muffled and light was softened..." Tents, like paintings, convey choices and constructions of subjective worlds, or homes.
Draney's painterly style of poised discretion, casts a spotlight upon each painted action or decision on an otherwise motionless stage. Grassy foregrounds drop off into raw canvas like the reaches of a flat earth. Lines are permeable or wavering and moments of contrast serve to barely shape the weightless surfaces of softened figures. The sometimes tentative, other times certain, performance of painting here isn't about making objects but about creating memories, fastening them down into form. The images appear thin and temporal, yet supportive. Evoking histories of trauma, natural disaster, and migrant living as well as community and unbreakable human bonds, these paintings locate the redemptive qualities of imagination and subjective memory formation within the survivalist mode of precarity.
Art Gallery of Alberta: http://www.youraga.ca/exhibit/brenda-draney-suspend
Brenda Draney: Suspend continues until March 9.
Andrea Williamson is a Calgary-based writer and artist. Her reviews have appeared in C magazine, Swerve, Color magazine, esse arts and opinion and FFWD. In January 2013 she initiated a critical theory reading group that meets monthly in a collective attempt to approach academic texts in peripheral and humble ways. She can be followed on Twitter @andreawillsamin
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Brenda Draney at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton
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