The full range of human emotion and experience goes on display this weekend with the opening of Voices from Within at Elevation Contemporary Art Gallery in Canmore.
This exhibition, which opens Saturday (Jan. 19), brings together Salt Spring Island, B.C. sculptor Morley Myers and painter Sonya Iwasiuk of Vancouver to share a body of work with Bow Valley residents described as a “powerful and emotionally charged exhibition” that serves to “convey our innermost feelings.”
Both Myers and Iwasiuk said the theme of the exhibition – Voices from Within – is fitting as they give their subconscious full reign while they work, guided by their experience and the stories that have inspired them.
Myers, whose stone sculptures will be featured at the gallery, described much of his process as “inner work” where he’s allowing those inner voices, the ones that speak from our subconscious, along with materials, to shape his work.
“It’s a matter of working with the material and just entering into the dialogue,” Myers said from his home on Salt Spring Island on Monday (Jan. 14). “Most of the good work comes from engaging and being open to the flow of the material.”
To that end, as he works with a piece of stone, he allows himself to be guided by the stone’s flaws, faults and fractures, incorporating those into the work.
“You’re heading in a direction and all of a sudden this happens and you have to be prepared to move with it and sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes you end up with a couple of hundred pounds of dust. And sometimes, if you are open to the process, it works quite well,” Myers said.
“Because most of my work is about human experience and emotion and especially when you are working with subconscious imagery, you may not understand what are you doing.
“So you’re creating an image and I’ll stand back and look at it and not really put it together because I’m too close to it and one of my close friends will look at it and say what’s obvious to anybody but me. And there you have it. You have a title. You have an emotion. You have the whole thing.”
Through this process, Myers, who is a self-taught artist, creates sculptures that are fluid and unique, seemingly influenced by ancient cultures such as African, Greek and perhaps even Inuit, but with a style that is distinctly his own.
In some pieces, the lines are smooth, rounded and soft, creating a gentleness, as in the case of “I Can Hear Your Heart,” which features a baby curled into its mother’s womb, or a soap stone mask with sharper, crisp edges that is tinged with melancholy, sadness and fear.
That same melancholy, sadness and fear can be seen in Iwasiuk’s remarkable figurative paintings that celebrate hope and our ability to survive despite the great adversity and tragedy people often face.
“A common theme for me is survival and hope,” Iwasiuk said. “The things that people survive and how they move on from that and the hope they must feel in order to move on.”
Focusing strictly on the posture, eyes and brows of her figures, Iwasiuk creates figures and scenes that suggest individuals who have been through something traumatic and yet remain strong with dignity intact, despite bent backs and heavily furrowed brows.
In Years of Night, for example, a couple cradle their child, and each other, and the suffering is clear in their posture and their faces. And yet, despite that, it is still clear they have one another and as a result, still have hope.
“I paint because I really hope that for people who see some of these paintings, their blinders are taken off and they can just see another part of the world and a different person’s reality and feel lucky and feel empathy,” Iwasiuk said.
“Watching the news or the Internet, so many stories are such a fleeting thing. By making a painting that somebody can stand in front of for more than 10 seconds, maybe they can put themselves in the story feel or feel empathy for the story or relate to it.”
Iwasiuk, who describes herself as a happy, positive person, said survivors are a constant inspiration.
Her paintings, certainly tinged with sadness and heartbreak, remind us, however, what it’s like to be human and what is important: family, the protective embrace of a parent or a friend.
And as Iwasiuk has discovered, there’s beauty in that, which is evident in her mixed-media paintings.
Barring any winter storms shutting down the Trans-Canada Highway, both Myers and Iwasiuk plan to attend the opening Jan. 19 from 2-7 p.m. Voices from Within ends Jan. 28.
