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Rachelle Wunderink: Your Comfort, My Silence

Eastern Edge is pleased to present our first Main Gallery exhibition of 2025! Your Comfort, My Silence by Rachelle Wunderink will be opening with a reception and special artist talk on Friday, January 31st from 6-8pm. Rachelle will begin her talk at around 6:30pm, and we will have lots of snacks and refreshments as usual! We can’t wait to kick off this year with you! Click here to RSVP to the Facebook event.

Trigger Warning: This exhibition is about experiences of sexual assault and trauma. Please read the exhibition description below so you can decide whether or not engaging with the work is right for you, prior to visiting the gallery.

Society censors, rather than confronts, stories of rape and harassment. Rachelle Wunderink’s work unveils the consequences of sexual assault trauma by engaging viewers with the emotional affect. Incorporating influences from Affect Theory, Relational Aesthetics, and Trauma therapy, Wunderink’s site-specific exhibition for Eastern Edge Artist Run Centre, “Your Comfort, My Silence” examines the ways that trauma lingers leaving lasting imprints on lives. She does this in three key ways throughout her body of work: ‘Blankouts,’ an immersive wheat-pasted installation, which looks at the covert ways in which society suppresses women’s stories of assault through the use of coded language and censorship. Secondly, ‘Trauma Embodied,’ looks at how the artist self-censors her own stories through a multi-layered editing process of nine different videos. Lastly, the artist activates the gallery space creating various modes of interaction with the work engaging her audience to consider the ways in which the work imprints on their own experiences.

Rachelle Wunderink would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their support of this exhibition.

Rachelle Wunderink is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee of “Onguiaahra” or Niagara Falls, Canada. She recently finished her Masters of Fine Arts at York University, where she was awarded The Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, (SSHRC) for her thesis exhibition. Over the past 10 years she has co-founded two separate artist collectives working mostly abroad in Taipei, Taiwan and Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has two upcoming solo exhibitions at IA&A Hillyer in Washington D.C (2024), and Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre in St.Johns (2025), and was featured in the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art’s Jump- Off exhibition. Rachelle is a proud mother of a two year old and a newborn, and can be found in her studio listening to podcasts such as Normal Gossip, or This American Life.


Photo Documentation

Photo Credit: Laura Sbrizzi

Check out the 360° scan below to view the exhibition virtually!