Miri (Maria) Chekhanovich, Kuh Del Rosario, Cecilia McKinnon
Tidelines
April 29-June 7, 2024
Vernissage : May 2nd, 2024, 5 pm to 7 pm
Cecilia McKinnon, CMYK (How to Look at an Iceberg), 2022. Photo credit : courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition description
Tidelines brings together the work of Kuh Del Rosario, Miri Chekhanovich, and Cecilia McKinnon, in a collaborative sculptural installation. This project is born from a desire to convene the three artists’ overlapping material vocabularies, to form a new language together in a shared space, and to initiate material processes which leak into one another in the time and space of the exhibition. All three artists enact gestures of repetition in processing their materials: gathering, dehydrating, grinding, cooking, casting, and flocking. They perform the generative ‘natural’ processes of erosion and reconstitution in the compressed timescale of the studio. Kitchen compost, mineral remnants, household and studio waste, and ubiquitous ingredients cohere into durational sculptures which desiccate, crystallize, melt, or host new life. Materials are encountered as half-digested by entropy and circulation through the currents of everyday life and global economies.
There is an element of indeterminacy to each artist’s practice, an openness to emergent forms and textures, and an opportunity to reflect on the poetics of materials. Working from discards, leftovers, and unpredictable elements, these works invite slow contemplation and close attention. What can be learned by simply witnessing the way things transform over time? The evident lifespans of the works invoke cycles of growth and decay in both form and process and speculate into the future lives of materials in the human waste stream, where things break down but never go away.
About the artists
Miri (Maria) Chekhanovich is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work fuses cooking, film and installation. Born in Armenia, Miri grew up in Jerusalem and immigrated to Montréal, Canada in 2013. She is currently navigating living and working between Armenia and the unceded Indigenous lands of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, QC. Miri holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a master's in fine arts from Concordia University, for which she received generous support from the FRQSC for her research. Her video installation Être avec was presented at the Phi Centre in Montréal and at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Her work with biodegradable sculptures has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hors Piste festival at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021. Since 2019, Chekhanovich has been working as a duo with film director Edith Jorisch, their first collaboration Plastisapiens premiered at Tribeca and received two awards: New Creative Technology at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam and an Impact award at the New Images Festival in Paris. In addition to Plastisapiens, Jorisch and Chekhanovich are developing a video installation project called Fruit Opéra.
Visit Miri's Instagram!
Kuh Del Rosario (she/her) is a Filipino/Canadian sculptor currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, QC. Attuning to everyday materials, Del Rosario’s practice is driven by her desire for grounding within the environment she takes part in.
Her practice has benefitted from the support of The Peter Thompson Family Graduate Scholarship (2020), Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2023), Canada Council for the Arts (2023), Fonderie Darling sponsored by Romany Eveleigh’s Gift (2023-2026), and The Claudine & Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2024).
Del Rosario has exhibited across Canada and the Philippines in group and solo shows. Most recently, she exhibited at Skol (QC), Centre Clark (QC), Maison de la Culture Monkland (QC) and is looking forward to participating in group exhibitions at The Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (AB) in August 2024, Fonderie Darling (QC) in September 2024 and a solo show at B-312 (QC) in February 2025.
Visit Kuh's Instagram!
Cecilia McKinnon is an interdisciplinary artist from California and New Mexico, currently living and working on occupied Lenni-Lenape land in Philadelphia, PA. McKinnon’s work explores entropy, time, precarious landscapes, and ‘natural’ histories through sculpture, video, textiles, critical cultural studies, and hybrid writing practices. McKinnon has shared work at Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), Cherry Street Pier and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Amos Eno Gallery (NYC), and RIPA (Montréal). She received the Emerging Artist Award in Surface Design’s 2021 Exhibition in Print, and was published in Sección Amarilla de la Migración, a 2022 anthology distributed to migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. She is a founding member of GRAFT Collective, based between Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Louisville. She holds a Master of Fine Art in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University in Montréal, and a BFA from the University of New Mexico.
Visit Cecilia's Instagram!
Press
Miri (Maria) Chekhanovich
NFB/ONF "Plastisapiens" Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch with Dpt.
Réseau Art Actuel "Nids de poule de Miri Chekhanovich"
Milieux, Speculative Life Biolab, "Fossilation at the Centre Pompidou"
Milieux, Speculative Life Biolab,"Making a Body"
Kuh Del Rosario
C Magazine “Entre les lignes – Writing Mountains” by Mojeanne Behzadi
Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce "GROUNDWORKS /TRAVAUX DE TERRASSEMENT /LUPANG TRABAHO" exhibition text by Laia Karmela Nalian. 2-PERSON Exhibition: Kuh Del Rosario / Matt Shane
