Colleen Heslin
Slow Peripheral Movements
May 10 to June 9, 2018
Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to present Colleen Heslin’s most recent series of fibre-based paintings, Slow Peripheral Movements. This body of work amplifies the push and pull of macro and micro shifts through poetics of broken and joined lines, and simulations of chromatic overlaps. The production of these works is akin to quilt-making practices, where fabric scraps are cycled from the periphery and into a central focus. Tension of connection is an ongoing actor in Heslin’s work through the pressure of seams stitched through fabric and stretched over a large frame.
Considering histories of abstraction and textiles from a feminist perspective, issues of labour, value and power are re-occurring in the works. The process of dying fabrics and sewing the paintings lends attention towards different scales of textile manufacturing; on a larger scope, we are all participants in the labor and environmental crisis of fast-fashion, including global disparities of wage based on race, place and gender. As a group, the paintings are ruminations on late capitalism and alternatives to this crisis, looking towards emerging movements of decentralization and de-growth. Slow Peripheral Movements looks back to trailblazing early Modernist female artists, and forward to slow and small-scale modes of working with deep material connections to everyday contemporary life.
Colleen Heslin graduated with an MFA from Concordia University in 2014. Her most recent solo exhibitions were held at the Esker Foundation (Calgary), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg), and the Charles H Scott Gallery (Vancouver). She has also exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal), SFU Gallery, Burnaby Art Gallery, Unit/Pitt Projects, Kinderhook & Caracas (Germany), RATS Collective (Switzerland), and numerous other venues. Her work has been written on and published in Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Canadian Art, Pyramid Power and other Canadian and international periodicals. Heslin won the RBC Painting Competition in 2013.