Vanessa Dion Fletcher is an accomplished artist and Bodies in Translation artist-in-residence for 2018. She is a graduate of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where she obtained her M.F.A. in 2016. Vanessa has received several awards for her work, including the Textile Museum of Canada Melissa Levin Emerging Artist Award. For more information about Vanessa, please visit her website: www.dionfletcher.com/
Vanessa will be exhibiting her work at several exciting upcoming events:
Inside Voices, a film by Vanessa Dion Fletcher, will be shown as a part of “That’s So Gay (TSG) 2018: Say My Name.” This group show is curated by Syrus Marcus Ware, and is presented with the 8th annual 10×10 Photography Project and Nuit Rose & Pride Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel. The exhibition runs June 13th till August 5th with the opening party on June 21st from 7-10pm. Artists will present Pechu Kucha talks (short presentations) on July 17th from 6-9pm.
This year’s participating artists are: Xanthe Blister, Quill Christie-Peters, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Myung-Sun Kim, Wy Joung Kou, Gabrielle Le Roux, Life of a Crap Head (Amy Lam + Jon McCurley), Patrisse Marie Cullors, Desmond Miller, Just Seeds Collaborative (Jesse Purcell + Mary Tremonte)
The TSG 2018 subtitle, Say My Name, refers to the #Sayhername campaign, centred around the killings of black women, in particular of black trans women, and the massive campaigns around Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) across Turtle Island.
[Still image from Inside Voices by Vanessa Dion Fletcher. There is a screen with a photograph of a bleeding cervix. The screen is surrounded by a soft brown curtain.]
In Vanessa’s words: “For TSG I am embracing the connection of female anatomy with domestic and interior spaces, lining the walls and floor with textiles creating a tactile comfortable viewing space.”
For more information about the event, visit the Gladstone Hotel website and the Facebook event.
Another exciting exhibition, Crosscurrents: Canada in the Making features Vanessa’s ongoing work with the Textile Museum of Canada. She created a work (in progress) entitled Body Image for the exhibition.
[Body Image by Vanessa Dion Fletcher. Her description is included in the quote below.]
According to Vanessa:
“The image is of a pelvis and legs with blood dripping into the ground, the phases of the moon are present with an abstraction that references florals patterns or clouds. I have been making and remaking this image in different forms for several years. I hesitated to start this work because I felt like I was repeating my self, but people seem to be very pleased with its new iteration and materials, perhaps I put too much emphasis on the new rather than returning to an always becoming image of a body.”
The exhibition is curated by Roxane Shaughnessy and includes artwork by Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Brenda Lee, Meghann O’Brien, Amanda Rataj, and Ovilu Tunnillie. The focus of the exhibition is the role that textiles play in storytelling, identity- and history-building and expression. From the curator’s description:
“At its core, Crosscurrents considers how textiles old and new stimulate the sharing of new knowledge and insights. Many object stories are held by the communities in which they were made. To reveal them, we have reached out to makers, family members, historians and artists to share their perspectives and knowledge, and summoned their collective voices – foregrounded through gallery commentary, social experiences, workshops, talks and performances, connecting diverse perceptions, passions and understandings from the past and the present into the future.” (Source)
Crosscurrents runs from June 27th 2018 till March 31st, 2019, with an opening reception on June 27th.
For more information, please visit the Textile Museum website.