Davida Nemeroff

Davida Nemeroff: Muscle Beach
digital C-print
48 x 60 in.

For the third summer group exhibition at Mulherin Pollard projects, Katharine Mulherin curates important young Canadian women artists. Interestingly connected, the artists in this exhibition invite us on an impressive voyage. Relating to their own lives, and the long and winding roads of others, each artist contributes work that is at once magical and transparent. Through transformative means, forceful and emotive content merges with contemporary issues in image and object production.

The title, "she feels it all", comes from a photographic text work made by Sojourner Truth Parsons, which is presented in the show. We stumble upon a path where a patch of flowers provides the message.

The voyage begins.

The work presented here is very much an extension of the artists themselves, full of sensuous labour, disturbance, and history. Their work is connected to their lives and the lives of those around them. Building community through their varied practices: whether they are painting their friends, photographing strangers, creating social experiments, documenting an imaginary or forgotten past, travelling, exploring, connecting, performing, collaborating, organizing, or facilitating, these artists are prime examples of what gets made when artmaking becomes everyday practice.

Elise Rasmussen's process utilizes historical narratives as inspiration to create new works of contemporary relevance. In the fall of 2009, she embarked on a self-directed residency in a tiny village in Newfoundland. Her photographic diptych, Ladies Lookout ,responds to the romanticism and strife of women whose fates rest on the elements. These images take its name from and were photographed at the point on Signal Hill where women would wait in hopes of seeing their men return from the sea. The diptych serves as a response to folklore and reflection of the intensely elemental environment of the island of Newfoundland and is part of the series When the Sun Crosses the Line That Wind Will Rule the Weather.
Elise Rasmussen (b. 1977, Edmonton, Canada) first honored her franco-philia at the age of ten by proclaiming she would go by her middle name Elise. She continues to indulge her penchant for French culture by spending time in cafes, using Garamond typeface whenever possible, and creating projects inspired by New Wave cinema and the French Revolution. In addition to these pursuits, her works explore many themes including the relationship between salt and love, and how art makes people sick.Elise received her BFA from Ryerson University in 2004 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 where she was awarded a full tuition scholarship for merit. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Austria and Germany. Elise lives in Brooklyn, NY and recently completed a project investigating reasons why the Atlantic Ocean is ruining her love life, and the legacy of the Cod Fishery and Beothuk cultures on contemporary identity in Newfoundland.

Julia Kennedy's work is the residue of an ongoing exploration into the meaning of life, how she has come to make sense of things, a reflection of her personal desire to find balance and direction with the universe. This quest has lead to the development of a personalized symbology, a sort of coded visual language: a distillation of experience, a thousand pounds of rose petals=a phial of essence.
Through the rearrangement of universal symbols and objects, the creation of brand new symbols, specific instances in time, and combinations of these, Kennedy keeps the work open enough to encourage investigation. Believing in the power of new and alternate modes of communication, she promotes a looseness and a wider vision.
Julia Kennedy (b. March 28, 1984) earned her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and also studied at Cooper Union in New York. She currently lives and works in Toronto.

Shauna Born's most recent paintings have been small, static portraits of strangers and intimates. Her work plays on the historical desire to document faces in portraiture. The size and nature of her paintings reflect the methods we use to consume image culture through ephemera such as digital photos, websites and magazines.
Since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2004, Shauna Born has lived and worked in Toronto and exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe. She has received Emerging Artists grants from the Ontario Arts Council in 2007 and 2009. In 2009 she received a Special Mention as a finalist in Canada's national portrait competition the Kingston Prize. Born has paintings in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art , Kansas, USA, The Beth DeWoody Collection, New York, USA, The Collection of George Hartman and Arlene Goldberg, Toronto, Canada, and the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, which is Canada's permanent collection of contemporary art. She is also in numerous private collections across Canada and the United States. In September 2010 she will begin her MFA degree at the University of Waterloo.

Sojourner-Truth Parsons' work considers the intersection of magic, acculturation, feelings and sexuality. With references to both folk art tradition and witchcraft, her work straddles the tenuous line between make-believe and healing in confronting histories that feel borrowed, but are, in fact, inherited. The works in this exhibition address a simultaneous identification with and desire for the other, with a familiar, but out-of-reach sense of ritual, spiritualism and community. Working with readily available materials such as cardboard, white glue and scrap leather, Parsons's sculptures, performances and photographs cast deliberately fraught narratives marked by specters of belief and magical intensity.
Sojourner-Truth Parsons is an artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been exhibited at Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects (Toronto), and will be seen at A1C Gallery (St. John's, Newfoundland) this fall. She recently toured with neo-folk band Tasseomancy, creating site-specific installations for their performances at venues across Europe. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University.

Elaine Stocki makes photographs and paintings of people in Winnipeg and New Haven, sometimes meeting them through classified ads that she has placed online or in the newspaper. She particularly likes groups of people. Her interests lie in the investigation of performance, spectacle and farce as tools for questioning and blurring the lines of gender, race and class. Stocki is seeking some sort of genuine expression of emotion in what are, for the most part, contrived situations.

Elaine Stocki (b.1979) was born and raised in Winnipeg Canada. She received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2009. Recently Stocki's photographs were included in Collier Schorr's experimental exhibition Freeway Balconies at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. She lives and works in New York City.

Heather Goodchild is a Toronto-based artist working primarily in textiles. Since 2002 she has used folk techniques such as rug-hooking, quilting, and inlaid patchwork to make objects and installations from an imagined history. By developing new ways to practice traditional crafts, she creates pieces that seem to exist both in the past and present. The stories and symbols in her work explore the human need for ritual, regalia, and a moral code.

Davida Nemeroff is an artist and the proprietress of Night Gallery (LA). Originally from Toronto, Nemeroff received her MFA from Columbia University in '09. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
For She Feels it All, Nemeroff explores the multivariate forms and bodies of power and femininity through a seductively moist lens.

Tyler Clark Burke works in paint, on paper, in glass, in metal, with people, with music, and now ash diamonds—but one thread always runs true: her themes are decidedly deadly. Her two last shows, A Murder of Vs and Shimera, were both widely reviewed; her work has been shown and collected internationally. Her career began in commissioned art for musicians (including a continuing collaboration with Feist, as well as work for artists on her own label Three Gut Records). She is a master of hi-jinx and heart strings, smoke and mirrors. Her work is a continuing play for passion, wrought in material. A fake abduction, a marching procession of faint zebras, and a spontaneous choreography of dirge dancers have all been part of her spectacle, your spectacle. Outside of art journals and magazines, her events and projects have been featured in or on MTV, Spin Magazine, ABC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and The National Post.

Tasseomancy is a continuation of what was a bare bones neo-gothic folk duo. Formerly known as Ghost Bees, Sari and Romy Lightman have begun to experiment with heavier, ambient sounds, influenced by death ritual, hebraic song, war drums, ancestry and myth. The sisters recorded their second full-length this winter with producer Taylor Kirk and accompanying band, Timber Timbre. It will be released sometime before the next thaw.

Castlemusic is the avant-folk songwriting project of Jennifer Castle, Toronto. Elusive and poetic on record, her songs insist they speak for themselves. Intuitive and generous performances aim to share their secrets. Both her records and performances have been well received and are held in high esteem by press, peers and community.