Alluvium: To Wash Against
Virginia Mitford
Opening reception: Saturday, September 16th from 6 – 9 pm.
Alluvium: To Wash Against exhibits a body of work that looks to the process of stone lithography as both a subject and a medium. A series of short animations, that use an extensive number of multilayered stone lithographs as stills, will be shown along with a selection of those prints.
Through the project Virginia considers the impact of physical gesture and movement in grounding herself within her body and physical surroundings, while linking the process of lithography to her childhood experience of a flood. She find links between art making and the rest of daily life by observing concrete actions and movements as a common denominator, particularly relating her past actions of cleaning up after the flood to the repetitive movements involved in making prints. The work was produced during a residency at Atelier Graff in Montreal and was recently shown in the SOVA Gallery through the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture’s Confluence Series in Dawson City, YT.
Virginia Mitford is an emerging artist who divides her time between the far edges of the country. She spent her childhood on a remote trapline by the Stewart River in the Yukon, with her family and sled dogs, an experience that continues to reveal itself through her art practice. Working with a variety of media, namely printmaking, dancing and drawing, she examines her own personal history within broader concepts of feminism, uncertainty and change. She uses the processes and actions involved in making art as a tool to orient herself within an overwhelming store of emotion, experience and memory, while attempting to look to the present as a renewed source of meaning. Graduating from Memorial University with a BFA in 2013, Virginia has since taken part in multiple artist residencies in Montreal, across Newfoundland, and the Yukon.
