Friday, March 1, 2019 to Friday, April 12, 2019
March 1 – April 12, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, March 1, 7-9 pm Artist-led Exhibition Walkthrough: March 1-2pm Saturday March 9
Forest City Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition "Carpathian-Andean Alloy" by Barbara Hobot.
This installation of new works by Barbara Hobot is a distillation of, and artistic response to, a two-year period of research. Her research examined tangential connections among the fog-catching nets of central Chile, the alchemical recipes of Isaac Newton, and the sonic terrain of her ancestral homeland, the Tatra Mountains. Borrowing from the museological language of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Hobot presents a darkened room (perhaps cave-like or gesturing toward a clandestine lab) where a 17th century painting by Joachim Wtewael is reproduced on a sheet of stainless steel. An elusive alchemical object called “The Net” is stitched in illuminated embroidery, and a barely legible recipe encoded in mythology glitters on a plate of reclaimed brass. Iron oxide, mist, magnetic force, and auditory hallucinations carve a matrix across the gallery to connect mountain ranges and eras.
Using photography, audio, video, and wall-based sculpture, Hobot creates a space where disparate locations, time periods, and objects align and fuse.
This solo exhibition marks an evolution of Hobot’s practice from formal investigations into the cultural, historical, and metaphorical associations of nets.
Accompanying the show is a creative response by artist, curator, and professor Jay Wilson. Copies are available at the gallery, free of charge.
The artist thanks Shannon Anderson, Patrick Cull, Jay Wilson, Forest City Gallery, FogQuest, Fundación Un Alto en el Desierto, and the Ontario Arts Council. The research conducted for this exhibition was supported by the Chalmers Arts Fellowship administered by the OAC.
Barbara Hobot holds an MFA from Western University, lives in Kitchener, and her work is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto. She has exhibited most recently at Cambridge Art Galleries, the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, with an upcoming show at the Durham Art Gallery curated by Ilse Gassinger. Her work has been shown across Canada, and in Białystok, Amsterdam, and Berlin. www.barbarahobot.com
Jay Wilson is a full-time professor of design in the Art and Art History program, a joint program between the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. He has an Honours degree in Wildlife Biology and Statistics from the University of Guelph, a diploma from the Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from York University. As an artist, Wilson has shown both locally and internationally, and has received numerous creation, research and exhibition assistance grants. His design and art practices are a mix of conceptual considerations and play, often full of segues, spontaneity and contradiction.
Image 1: Barbara Hobot, Carpathian-Andean Alloy, 2019, UV digital print on metal, inkjet print on recycled poly linen, 12” x 24” x 1.5”.
