She Wrote

Avery Steel + Melanie Winter + Cassandrea Xavier

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 8th, 2017: 6 – 9pm
Exhibition Run: Saturday, April 8th , 2017 – Sunday, April 30th, 2017.

She wrote. She wrote because she had suffered. She wrote because she knew others, like her, had also suffered. She wrote because they told her not to. She wrote because she could.

She Wrote presents works by artists Avery Steel, Melanie Winter, and Cassandrea Xavier. The show explores female identity and personal narratives related to trauma. The act and process of making is emphasized as a therapeutic and cathartic response to violence by engaging with the artist’s subjective narrative as a way of healing, communicating, and reclaiming their stories. Women are silenced and encouraged to be strong throughout lapses of pain and adversity. These artists have chosen to speak out and bare themselves as an act of empowerment. She Wrote becomes a form of resistance in which the subjective narratives of each individual collide to communicate their ability to grow, heal, and overcome conflict.

The exhibition includes the photographic projects I Speak Because I Can by Avery Steel, Untitled Performances by Melanie Winter and text-based works Plush and Thick by Cassandrea Xavier. These works invite the viewer to hear about and participate in stories that are often reduced to a simple account of victimhood. All three projects delineate from the problematic label of “victim” that is often used to pathologize individuals. Instead, the work functions as a form of opposition where each project approaches and contests an aspect of their social lives that work to marginalize individuals and collectives that do not fit hegemonic ideologies. The works invite the viewer to be an active participant in the re-reading and understanding of the artist’s subjectivity, and resists the meta-narratives that are silencing and alienating. She Wrote becomes a space that occupies multiple simultaneous perspectives and uses the gallery as a tool to disseminate new knowledge and ideas pertaining to feminine identity. It becomes a space where women can feel heard, welcomed, and safe.

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Avery Steel is a Toronto-based artist working in a hybrid region exploring the relationship between performance and photography. Avery began as a performer, dancing, singing and acting on stage for years before embracing lens-based imagery as part of her practice. The camera is used as a tool to document self-choreographed performance pieces in which the body and the surrounding physical environment convey representations of a past-self. Considering themes of sexuality, gender, mental health, trauma and control, Avery uses performance and surrealism to create imagined spaces with the intention of subverting the familiar by introducing the presence of the uncanny. Through this subversion of expectation and the honest use of an autobiographical narrative as a conceptual framework, Avery’s work enables audiences to understand that, while emanating from experience, the personal and the political are aligned.

Cassandrea Xavier is a text and image based artist working in Toronto.

Melanie Winter is an artist working in a hybrid region of performance and photography. Through collaboration with other women, Melanie uses the camera as a tool to document the ephemerality of performance art. The images that result from this practice are process-based and focus on performed femininity, problematizing ideas suggested by a heteronormative imaginary. The camera is used as a medium to represent the past self, and is considered a therapeutic aid that promotes self-actualization.