very very very
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
Ioana Dragomir
Forest City Gallery, 1025 Elias St.
March 21 – May 14, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21, 2026 @ 1–3pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, March 19, 2026 @ 7pm
Virginia Woolf was a writer, Vita Sackville-West was too, and Vanessa Bell was an artist. You can find their letters and diaries on the internet. You can peer into their homes! Virginia and Vita wrote novels but they also wrote to each other. They called each other “dearest creature” and “pig” and “you angel” and Virginia really liked Vita’s legs. Vanessa painted canvases but also the tiles around her fireplace and the backs of chairs and Virginia’s face again and again and again.
I have been hungrily consuming this content. In very very very, I question the lack of privacy afforded to these artistic figures and the way I, too (I, especially), have been a voyeur and invaded it. The exhibition includes drawings of photos from Virginia’s albums where her face denies the camera by being over-exposed or in shadow or turned away. A text collaged from letters between Virginia and Vita scrolls along the gallery’s baseboards. Their letters, rubbed clean of page numbers and unbound from their order, rest on a stack of quilts inspired by Charleston House, where Vanessa lived.
Two privacy screens (one for kissing, one for lying down), provide cursory cover for you. They are studded with pockets full of things you can’t quite see. Everything has a back-side and a front-side. The front is public-facing and prepared and the backside is soft and vulnerable like a turtle’s belly. Think of someone wearing a shirt inside-out, seams exposed. Think of a postcard with its generic front and I-miss-you-back.
Artist Bio:
Ioana Dragomir is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently based in Montreal, Canada. She has an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Western University and an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University. She has shown her work with Support, Centre Clark, the plumb, and Robert McLaughlin Gallery, among others.
Her artistic practice combines her interest in writing, literary analysis, and curation with drawing, textiles, and installation. In particular, poetic methodologies of juxtaposition, metaphor, and slippage are important to her practice. She loves Sappho, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.
Join us for the Artist Talk on Western University campus in the Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB), room 1170, on Thursday, March 19, 2026 at 7pm!
Join us again at the gallery for the Opening Reception on Saturday, March 21, 2026 from 1–3pm!
Thank you to our funders the London Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and the London Community Foundation for their support to make our exhibitions and programming free and accessible for all.
