FUNCTIONALS ALSO WONDERINGS is a collection of utilitarian sculptures, the evidence of ongoing research surrounding the activated and speculative potential of salvaged objects and images, each assemblage included in this collection has been constructed and transformed from modified salvaged material, whether sourced from free items discarded and discovered, purchased via the second hand economy and or from gathered and accumulated natural and domestic debris. The framework of limitation and the context that surrounds its creation, shapes its emerging utility, aesthetic, power, auratic, narrative exhibition potential. Many associations and questions orbit the creation and context of these objects : a personal, environmental politic consequences and possibilities in the age of the ANTHROPOCENE the margins, the material of marginal spaces, salvage practices, doing/it/yourself, self-determination the intuitive, the ineffable, the auratic simultaneity alternative domestic utility, aesthetic, provisionality, care. purpose, POWER ~ ACTIVITY of material and arrangement, visions of post-industrial? FUTURES hopefulness, fatigue, curiosity : these things are like a nimbus + part of a cycle + anticipating + forecasted + something else, inextricably linked.
Documentation
Artist Bios
Maggie Groat
Maggie Groat works in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications. Her current research surrounds site-responsiveness with regards to shifting territories, alternative and decolonial ways-of-being, and the transformation of salvaged materials into utilitarian objects for speculation, vision and action. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Western Front (Vancouver BC), The Power Plant, Mercer Union, Erin Stump Projects (Toronto, ON), and Rodman Hall Brock University (St. Catharines, ON). She is the editor of the collected works, The Lake, published by Art Metropole, in 2014. Groat was an Audain Artist Scholar in Residence at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, British Columbia) in 2014 and nominated for the Sobey Art Award in 2015. Groat studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is represented by Erin Stump Projects in Toronto, Ontario and currently lives and works between the Niagara Escarpment and the southwestern shore of Lake Ontario, traditional territory of the Chonnonton and Haudenosaunee.
Maggie Groat gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Erin Stump Projects. She would like to thank Peta Rake for writing a text for the exhibition.