REBECCA LADDS: MAKING MUD WITH MILK

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6th, 6:00-9:00pm
Exhibition Dates: September 6 - 30, 2018
Location: Project Gallery, 1210 Dundas Street East

Project Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Rebecca Ladds running concurrently with ‘I Like for you to be Still’ by Sarah Letovsky.

‘Making Mud with Milk’ displays the artist’s obsessive act of collecting, reproducing and fixating on historically recurring imagery. This fixation is an attempt to understand the universal complexities of intimacy, association and memory through image. Focusing on the potential for these things to be at the same time nurturing and oppressive; a feeling of being capable of both love and hate, preferring neither, accepting both.

Inspired by tableau staging in theatre and cinema, the act of drawing canonizes seemingly commonplace imagery, elevating their subject’s status from the familiar to the dramatic. Their impact from afar can be very different than when viewed up close and they invite a view from both. The gallery space becomes a multi-dimensional collage of images with Ladds’ drawings acting as locations for pause. It is possible for these images to relate to each other, some only based on proximity, much like bodies passing each other in a room, performing a narrative without words.

Motivated by the feeling that despite how comfortable we are with these subjects, they are essentially profound, strange and spectacular. By changing their scale, isolating them from their environment/the rest of their bodies, removing colour and smoothing the textures, all that remains is a neutral outer shell. Their openness makes them vessels, spaces to be filled with memory. Whose hands are those? They’re yours. They may be your mother’s too. Does it make you feel at ease?

With a nod to her her own experiences and her mother’s interest in studying floral arranging in her youth, Ladds exhibits a collection of custom bouquets and preserves their composition in the form of drawings, aiming to document the impermanent subject as an act of gratitude; shedding light on the artist’s process in the creation of her work.

Rebecca Ladds is a visual artist currently based in Montreal, Quebec. Ladds graduated OCADU in 2014 with a BFA in Printmaking and has completed residencies in Toronto ON, Prince Edward County ON, and Florence, Italy. Ladds’ work has been shown in Toronto at the Toronto International Art Fair, in several collaborations with the Drake Hotel and Properties, The Gladstone Hotel, at the Art Gallery of Ontario for the Art With Heart Auction and as well as the Elgin Winter Garden Theater.