Karen Kraven
Radek Brousil

On view  07.11.2018 – 01.2.2019

Can you hear that sound?                                                                 Or, have you ever heard that sound?

Your great grandma probably did. And it’s probably vibrating in someone’s fingers now: somewhere on the other side, where the sun is still shining. Or it’s not. When your next Friday party shirt is being made. She can hear it, that’s for sure.

Whrrr.

Sorry.

Whrrr.

Pair of Levi’s so old you can see the sky through. Family heritage. Blue and blue goes well together, right? Karen Kraven’s work brings ubiquitous presence of jeans into objects made from devalued denim. To perform the labour of garment workers, scissors are now in charge of aesthetic erosion. The Singer still tries to hold the edges together. Last touch. Whrrr.

In numbers; it takes 15 pattern pieces to make one pair of jeans, up to 24 people can work on an individual pair from cutting to sewing to pressing and distressing as well as 3479 liters of water are used during a pair’s life cycle.

Hey, sorrow, where are you?

Walkman. Volume up. A bit of tears and teenage fantasies. Twenty years later that sadness comes again, smoothly mixed with very last drops of water, all packed in immortal plastic bottle. Melancholic post-graffiti romance is imprinted into soothing hand–made ceramics and patchworks by Radek Brousil, who hopelessly tries to depict social–cultural–ecological conditions of today’s world.

Cause I just want to be

Something more than the mud in your eyes

I want to be the clay in your hands

                                   Text by Valentýna Janů

Karen Kraven

Karen Kraven is a Montreal-based artist. Her work combines image and object into installations inspired by the body and optical illusion, through investigations of sport, clothing and instances of camouflage and doubling. She often use fabrics and photography as references to the skin and function to disguise and distort the body’s appearance (or disappearance) whether obscured, sexualized or beguiled.

Recent solo exhibitions include Pins & Needles,Toronto Sculpture Garden, Toronto (2018), MAW, NYC (2017), Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2016), Mercer Union, Toronto (2015) and Razzle Dazzle Sis Boom Bahpresented at the ICA, Portland, Maine and the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2014/5). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at La Friche la Belle de la Mai, Marseille, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto. Reviews have been published in Canadian Art, Artforum and Momus. Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, TD Bank Group, RBC, Banque Nationale and private collections. Kraven is represented by Parisian Laundry in Montreal. 

Radek Brousil

Radek Brousiloften mixes objects, sculpture, photography and video in his artistic practice. His focus, however, is based on a broader investigation of photography - namely, on its technical and artistic properties as well as its current usage and socio-economic implications. Brousil is therefore mainly interested in displacements, gestures of appropriation, phenomena of misinterpretation and the non-existence of the "natural world" in the field of contemporary cultural and economic exchanges. 

His selected solo shows: Cool Water, Poetry Passage,w/ Johan Grimonprez curator Adam Budak, National Gallery Prague, 2018, Stupid(duo show with Peter Puklus), FAIT Gallery, Brno, 2018, Red Naomi(curated by Michal Novotny), 16 Nicholson street, Glasgow, 2017, Black & White in Photography, Prague City Gallery, 2016, Studio Works - Fotograf Gallery, Praha, 2014, Study Of A Young Man - Karlin studios - Prague, 2009, St. Francis Comes to Montreal, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, 2008

He is currently studying PhD in visual art - sculpture at The Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. At the moment he is having a residency at The Darling Foundry in Montreal, Canada until November 2018.