A Prolonged Handshake

"A Prolonged Handshake" is a collaborative project between artist Brianna Gluszak and Hannah Parrett that addresses questions about materiality between glass, textiles, drawings, and paintings. Three iterations have occurred within this collaboration. From June-July 2021 "A Prolonged Handshake" was the second iteration that utilized spatial components in Urban Arts Space to explore moments where the architecture naturally breaks the hard-edged expectation of a gallery. Shifting scales and the relationship of the body to image/object became important themes as the work developed, and the idea of creating objects that embody transitions the more you move through the space.

Questions that arose during this exhibition: How do different forms or colours get transformed through culture to embody specific gendered characteristics? What are the implications that arise when words within different languages perform or categorize non-human objects and subject them to a specific gender? What are the limitations of how the history of abstraction is framed, and how can we both embrace and challenge these conventions? What is the relationship between seeing a color/form, and feeling one?

Sad Lady Sad

The title Sad Lady Sad is not meant for you to assume we are simply sad women, or that all women artists are sad. Femme Triste, a text that translates to Sad Lady in English, is pulled from the painting Le sens propre (The Literal Meaning) by Rene Magritte. Sad Lady Sad is a way for us to poke fun at these tropes in art that frame, quite literally, women as emotional or sad, deemed for one type of lifestyle or career, and create the narrative that abstract art created by women is often emotional at its core.

The first iteration of collaboration between Brianna Gluszak and I, Sad Lady Sad was a manifestation of utilizing our works as fragments within an installation. Thinking of the space as a drawing, all of the vinyl cutouts were made on site and in response to each other’s individual works. We began to refer to our collaboration as a prolonged handshake (one that occurred at a six foot distance for a while). Taking and borrowing concepts, visual information, formal elements and colors from each other's individual practices we are mashing our two heads, four hands, and years of conversations together to experience a change in narrative surrounding the work.

If, And, With

Responding to the chance happenings that arise within a given limitation is ingrained in the work of artists whether we work alone in our studios or collaboratively with others. If, And, With is a collaborative effort shared by 3 painters, Miranda Holmes, Kristen Phipps, and myself. As painters, we receive the inheritance (a burden and a blessing) of the work of artists before us; as an acknowledgement to this passing down of traditions, we structured our collaboration based on Josef Albers’ systematic exploration of color in his 1963 series of silkscreen and printed paper serigraphs. Like a controlled science experiment, Albers uses one composition and four colors to test the different ways in which these colors shift the experience of the work.

The structure of our collaboration works similarly: each artist had their chance to be first, second, and third during the sequence of collaboration on a painting or drawing. The resulting content is as surprising to the viewer as it is to the artists themselves. Our own idiosyncrasies of approaching painting, from the colors to the compositions to the subject matter we consistently return to, collide with each other’s sense of responding to a “problem” or an opening in what is given. Ultimately, the act of working in collaboration begets the content of the work. Our group show underlines the challenge of working with what is given, as well as the belief that creating a relationship with others and the world around us is valuable in and of itself.