Installation view of Soft enough to slip through by Amanda Chwelos. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Blaine Campbell.
AMANDA CHWELOS
Soft enough to slip through
6 JULY 2024 - 28 SEPTEMBER 2024
Ornamentation is an invitation and a barrier. Amanda Chwelos takes a closer look at the contradictions, anxieties, and banalities of the decorative. Soft enough to slip through features a new series of drawings and oil paintings that combine motifs of domestic wrought iron air vents, fences, and grates, together with intimate observations from daily life. These barriers typically demarcate space for purposes of safety, property, and exclusion. To Chwelos, the ornamented designs are also metaphorical boundaries. They characterize the kind of soft architectures of clothing and personal decoration that protect and separate human subjectivities.
On the wall of the gallery is a diptych of two small oil paintings in extreme close-up, one of the insertion of a contact lens, and the other of a mosquito. Both works bare the faint traces of decorative wrought-iron architecture fading in and through their respective figures. The mosquito is poised to break the barrier of skin and the contact lens is about to become an invisible membrane of the body.
Like personal fences of skin and clothing, these wrought iron architectures are also surfaces of inhabitation and admission (1). Both fences and frocks dissolve into their containing structures, becoming unnoticed conditions of access.
Lisa Robertson, “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding,” in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011), 142.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager.
Amanda Chwelos (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Edmonton-amiskwaciwâskahikan. Her work aims to understand complexities of her own identity and existence through an exploration of themes surrounding introspection, banality, anxiety, and acceptance. Driven by a material-based practice, she works primarily in drawing, painting, and sculpture.
Amanda holds a diploma in Fine Art from MacEwan University (2017) as well as a Bachelor of Fine Art and Design from the University of Alberta (2019). Since graduating, Amanda has remained an active member in both the Edmonton arts community and the broader Albertan artist community. Her work has been subject to many group exhibitions in including The Mirror, The Echo, The Panopticon (2023) at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Center in Medicine Hat, Fully Realized (2022) at Latitude 53 in Edmonton, and Salvage (2022) at Lowlands Project Space in Edmonton. In 2022, Amanda exhibited her first solo exhibition titled Easter Eggs for Conversation at Soft Gallery in Edmonton, AB.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.