a feeling
is effervescent. An embodied reaction born in our brains and spread to the tips of our limbs. It is joy and sorrow and love and despair.
of a feeling
that is intangible. Unable to be articulated by words but pass along by generations of gestures. It is inherited and lives alongside us; sometimes as intimately as a strand of hair and sometimes as distant as a forgotten photo album on a shelf.
Through the site-specific installation works of mihyun maria kim, Jackson Klie, and Gillian Toliver, A Feeling of A Feeling seeks to examine how we coalesce with untranslatable affects that are bestowed upon us by way of identity. Themes of translucency, translation and fragmentation are brought forward by the artists as they employ gestural responses to the inefficacy of language as a way of communicating with themselves. In this, the exhibition space extends to a place of conversation to delve into a feeling of a feeling.
The Plumb
1655 Duffrin St. Baement.
September 6 - October 6 2024
Saturday + Saturday, 2pm - 5pm
Opening reception Friday September 6, 6pm - 9pm
Exhibition Essay - https://theplumb.ca/A-Feeling-of-A-Feeling
mihyun maria kim
mihyun maria kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, researching untranslatable affects shaped by languages within unresolved historical grief and transmissions of longing. Exhaustion of the body, repetition of gestures, and telling of hi/stories are observed, interpreted, and depicted in the space between memory and imagination. Through relational methodology, her multivocal outcomes take in/visible form in poetry, painting, performance/activations, audio/video, site-specific installations, community-based round tables and public art.
maria was a finalist of The Kingston Prize 2023, and previous member of the RBC Emerging Artist Network (2022-23) at The Power Plant. Her works have been part of various group exhibitions, with solo shows at the John B. Aird, Ignite, and Collision gallery in Toronto, S1 Vinyl&Kaffee in Leipzig, and La Figurativa in Seville, with Gallery@501 (‘24) and Chester Art Centre (‘25) scheduled. She has been an artist-in-residence at Artscape LaunchpadXOCAD U, Gladstone House, AKINXCollision Gallery, Mississauga Living Arts Centre, and internationally at Villa Villekulla, La Napoule, Pilotenkueche, AIRGentum, Can Serrat, and CAMAC. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design and BFA in Drawing and Painting, both from OCAD University.
Jackson Klie
Jackson Klie’s work utilizes an expanded approach towards photography through its incorporation of collage, sculpture, and alternative image-based processes. He often works with deconstructed and reclaimed photographic material, playing with taxonomies and the aesthetics of the archive to speculate on queer alternative practices of communication, gathering, and remembering. In positioning the photograph as a queer object, these views are expressions of our anxious relationship to photography and identity – representing a permeable web used to sift through the detritus of our image-soaked culture.
The works presented in a feeling of a feeling were created in response to the exhibition’s themes of translation, fragmentation, and the inefficacy of language. Beginning with a found collection of plant taxonomy photographs, Klie created an image-based installation using a series of digital collages.
Jackson Klie is an image-based artist living in Hamilton, Ontario. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University. Recent exhibitions have been presented at Xpace Cultural Centre, Gallery 44, Birch Contemporary, and the Contact Photography Festival. He was longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award in 2018 and 2023.
Gillian Toliver
My work is a reaction to the absurdity, multiplicity and fluidity of being. Painting forms in quick succession, I move as if washing the floor, without thought or hesitation. The painted forms are then drawn in pencil, moving as I would brush my hair, stroke by stroke. In this slow translation from paint to graphite I feel an honoring and witnessing to a moment of bodily freedom –a gathering of self. Luxuriating in the grey space between enigmatic fragments of identity, these host forms explore the unspoken conversations that the ‘I’ can not.
Gillian Toliver is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her OCAD University thesis presentation Paper Skin Makes Me Waver in the Breeze was awarded the Medal for Drawing and Painting and Nora E. Vaughan Award. As an artist of mixed Scottish and Caribbean descent, her work often explores spaces existing in an in-between, a world caught in a moment of creation. Utilizing practices of labour,repetition and ritual, Toliver creates forms to explore the absurdity and fluidity of being. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Italy, and South Korea.
