Shedding

Shedding is a hybrid curatorial/collaborative process-based exhibition that explores the intersection of art and everyday actions. It includes the work of three women artists who interrogate the domestic in light of their parallel productions as artists and investigates how women artists integrate their careers with the stuff of everyday life. (Susan Shantz & Lezli Rubin-Kunda with Honor Kever: Artists’ Statement)

photo credit: Derek Sandbeck and Susan Shantz

Exhibition:

Shedding (collaboration with Lezli Rubin-Kunda + Honor Kever), AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, SK, 2019

Links:

Lezli Rubin-Kunda website with photos and 2 short video clips: https://www.lezlirubinkunda.com/installations/material/shedding/

Art Exhibition: Shedding (AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, 2019): https://artsandscience.usask.ca/news/articles/3307/Art_exhibition_Shedding

Publications and Artists’ Statement:

Joan Borsa, excerpt from AKA Gallery text; pdf link

In Susan Shantz’s sculptural assemblage, remnants from a childhood archive, including a boy- scout scarf, stuffed toys, a desk lamp, a rag doll, a xylophone, a baby blanket, and two wooden stools are meticulously enveloped with transparent stretch wrap – an intimacy of associations bound together, a symbolic memorializing of familial history, a type of holding or processing prior to release. The layers of transparent plastic only partially enclose the objects, allowing us to see inside, as if exposing and offering a glimpse into an interior or psychic realm. Recollections and a transitional state appear to tug at each other, asking us to question: what is being shed, and what remains?

Susan Shantz & Lezli Rubin-Kunda with Honor Kever: Artist Statement

Shedding is a hybrid curatorial/collaborative process-based exhibition that explores the intersection of art and everyday actions. It includes the work of three women artists who interrogate the domestic in light of their parallel productions as artists and investigates how women artists integrate their careers with the stuff of everyday life.

The blurred boundary between art and life can result in imaginative responses that cross- pollinate art and domestic life. For artists with children, especially those that are leaving the “nest,” this might include the
accumulated stuff of parenting – materials transformed through live action in rituals of shedding years of layered accretions. Existing photo murals by Honor Kever (The Brooding Rooms, 1986-88) provide a context for Susan Shantz and Lezli-Rubin-Kunda to work collaboratively in the gallery with materials from earlier stages of life in ritualized processes of transformation.  Also included in this exhibition was work created by women at the Mother’s Centre, Station 20 West, where Shantz had co-facilitated arts-based workshops the previous year.