The Hearth is hosting a new collective exhibit from February 22 to March 12 where paper-cuts, paintings, and photographs meet each other to explore the perceived value of simple objects and matter.
Three artists with three very different ways of working, highlight the beauty of everyday items and share their interest in the transformation of humble materials into a more profound experience.
Heather Stephens is a long-term Bowen Island resident and a former teacher from Bowen Island Community School. A talented quilter and sewer, she has been working with painting as her new medium since she retired. What she loves the most is to stay at home and make things; to be a “Homebody”, like she says.
In this exhibit, she presents her most recent body of work where she observes ordinary objects found in the kitchen - a place she calls the Heart of the Home - and represents them in a simplistic style. Her adorable folk art still life subjects as well as her more abstract paintings invite us to pause a moment and to reflect on the objects and textures embedded in our daily lives.
Adrian Duchateau is a Vancouver-based professional photographer originally from Mexico. His aesthetic and narrative interests made him shift his practice from commercial to artistic photography. His artistic research emphasizes the narrative force of photography through the juxtaposition of found discarded objects within a still frame.
In his series of pictures, he explores the value of objects commonly seen as valueless. Collecting single-use artifacts and leftover bits of our overconsumption, he creates compositions from which new stories and dialogues emerge. In reconfiguring meaningless trash into pristine miniatures, Adrian’s work invites the viewer to shift their perspective about what we cherish as individuals, and as a society.
Rachael Ashe is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and maker. Curious to see how far a simple piece of paper can be sculpted and reformed and how patterns can be mixed together, she creates colorful hand-cut artworks and collage compositions from paper, inspired by textiles’ designs and especially quilt-making.
Repetitive and meticulous actions are the core of her artistic process. She sees them as a form of meditative and devotional labor in which tiny actions become part of a larger whole; a metaphor for the repetition of modest acts and events of our regular lives. Rachael’s delicate paper work invites the viewers to pause again, this time in a place of quietness and contemplation.
The Artist pARTy is on Saturday, February 25 from 6 to 8 pm with the presence of the artists, DJ Yeshe, bar service, and snacks.
