2023-24, serigraph

(RE)PATTERNING is a joyful, collaborative expression of pattern as a place of resistance, reimagining and unmaking. Through close looking and repetition in printmaking practices, this ongoing collaborative exploration between Val Loewen and Amanda Wood obscures and reveals the sense of otherness that is part of feeling compelled to self-identify in a normative culture. Considering the power of an illegible text, the work is both intuitive and draws from the work of thinkers like Edouard Glissant and adrienne maree brown, working to consider new ways of unknowing that make space for divergence. 

Repeated actions – breaking, revealing, and rearranging – are at the core of an attempt to uncover an imagined sensory language that moves beyond the visual to navigate experiences that there are no words to describe. Representational images and mundane objects have been abstracted into sound, texture, patterns, and imagined narratives that engage with conceptions of coded language and collaborative storytelling. It is a process of unlearning perceptions of value and reframing a relation to a social and cultural environment. 

Made with support from the Canada Council for the Arts