Erika Germain | The Names of Loved Ones

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Erika Germain, “Tokens of Love,” 2024

ceramic (courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: Friday October 18^th, 7 -10 pm

The Names of Loved Ones is an ongoing project by emerging artist Erika Germain, reflecting on community, ritual and exchange through the poetics of language, translation, and art making.

In the fall of 2022, Erika took part in a residency in the rural community of Ingonish, Nova Scotia where she made one hundred small paintings on paper. These paintings were all translated from the names of loved ones in her life and were then given away to members of the community. In exchange she asked for them to write down and offer the name of one of their own loved ones.

Over the past two years the artist has begun translating each name into an artwork through a system of assigning colours to letters. Each letter E becomes a dot of cadmium red, each letter B a stroke of cobalt blue, continuing until the text exists only in a language of visual forms, shapes and textures.

Translating these collected names, each painting is composed with the intention of representing someone who is loved. One or more names are filtered through the invented codes of colour and transformed into gradient curling lines or scattered ceramic forms, and then surrounded by intricately painted abstract contexts—new worlds to house them in their new language. In this way the process of translation is true to itself, seeking to capture the intimacy and sincerity of the original. This process, a ritual in its own right, contextualizes a new exchange, asking for a token of love in exchange for a token of love.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, visitors are invited either to bring with them a meaningful object (small enough to fit in the palm of a hand) that they would like to offer as a token, or to create one using materials provided in the gallery. In exchange they may select a ceramic coin created by the artist to take with them and to keep.

Examining the systems that indicate our social structures, whether constructed by our own making or relied on as divine patterns, “he Names of Loved Ones unravels these structures of exchange within our conversations, our communities, our economies, and even our systems of belief. This exhibition considers deeply the question of what it means to give and receive, and the inevitable relationships we create in every exchange, whether of currencies, time, information, food and drink, kind words, funny stories, oil paintings and lumps of clay, and of course our feelings, our love and our need for one another.

The poetics of these systems offer us our ability to express, and this ability is the opportunity for connection and understanding. It is how we know each other. Language is our shared ritual, words that we repeat over and over until they mean something, it is an accumulation of prayers said, words whispered, fires lit, love made.