Gallery 295 | Felicia E. Gail
Felicia E. Gail returns to Gallery 295 with a major solo exhibition, travel back to blue. She explores her continued investigation of paratactic objects and personhood through photographic installation. Gail imbues the architectural form of 295 into a site of immersive display, where her key materials, Tarps, take on a transformative quality and lead one through a rich dispersal of use recorded as-photograph within the tarps themselves. Here the relationships between what is presented are aroused by her intersubjective connections with these materials, which are explored as photographic stand-ins as a function of personhood – translated into poetics through form. Parallel to her as-photograph tarps is the spatial construction of support structures as-landscape. These supports intersect the whole of the gallery with deliberate spaces for intimacy.
Together these materials and temporary structures, in tandem with photographic images and used-up film canisters, articulate Gail’s own horizon as a frame through which her subjective poetics takes place. This immersive horizon of objects invokes and obscures what is understood as seen and experienced. In travel back to blue Gail implements a kind of autopoiesis – a system where the installation is itself a generative production and result of a history located in the roots of South-Eastern Americana, loss, desire, and the complex journey to the Pacific North West. The as-photograph pieces within the as-landscape installation serve as a kind of time-travel into Gail’s original purposing of these items through their repurposed forms emphasizing their socio-political connotations. As a whole these materials bring the poetics of Felicia E. Gail’s expanded photographic practice into the foreground and immediately transports her poetics into the backgrounded horizon of personal interpretation and projected meaning, which for Gail results as a function of time-travel. travel back to blue is an invitation to experience
Felicia E. Gail is an artist, writer, curator, and educator from the Southeast region of the United States (Florida) currently residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work investigates memorialized and liminal space, events, and objects through transdisciplinary praxis and is guided by contemporary visual art processes in installation, photography, performance, sculpture, and writing. She has exhibited, published, and performed in Vancouver, Chicago, Minneapolis and in Pensacola, FL. Felicia is currently a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and is a board member at Unit/Pitt Projects in Vancouver, BC. Some recent affiliations for exhibitions, events, readings, and curatorial projects have included, Semi-Public (221a Artist Run Centre, Access Gallery, grunt gallery), Galiano Island Self-Guided Residency, House on Hawks Summer Residency, Vancouver Art Gallery (David Wisdom Summer Slideshow), Open Books Bookstore – FL.