Mandy Espezel: Body Longing

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Mandy Espezel, "Pink Shadow," 2021

oil on canvas, 14" x 19.25"

Mandy Espezel: Body Longing

The SAAG is pleased to host an in-person talk and tour with exhibiting artist Mandy Espezel on January 27 at 6 - 7 pm MST In-Person and Free With Admission

The Articulations Art Lecture Series offers presentations from contemporary practicing artists and arts professionals. Local and international artists, curators, critics, art historians, theorists, filmmakers, and more, join us in discussion online, sharing their practice and engaging with the audience in open, critical discussion.

Join us for the opening reception November 26. Doors open at 7 PM with opening comments at 7:30 PM.

We are also pleased to host Lars Henrik Blind, from Karesuando in Sweden, who has fully mastered the traditional Sámi yoik, and will perform for this opening reception. Lars Henrik has yoiked since he was a child and is a traditional bearer in his yoik style.

Mandy Espezel’s site-specific painting installation engages with the lived bodily knowledge of both painter and viewer. Painters paint because they are fleshed. Subjective experiences are received and perceived through the body, and meaning is manifested through the embodied act of vision. Seeing a painting is not accomplished only through the senses but through a bodily situation in time and place. Espezel's works resist an organizing schema, instead inviting bodies to be present in a painterly way, using eyes, mind, and body together to decipher and experience meaning.

The installation of Espezel's work is akin to a painting in space. They extend choices of colour, line, scale, and composition into the three-dimensional gallery. Each installation involves a process of allowing the exhibition context to influence visual and tactile choices. Espezel accentuates the quirks of the century-old Carnegie library gallery space for an experience that entwines vision, tactility and movement. Works are created and installed in response to the physical and luminous specificity of the gallery. Partitions are built to obscure and necessitate movement, as well as rewarding visual exploration.

The title, Body Longing, in Espezel's words refers to, "a question of whether humans will mourn for a state of bodiment that we will no longer inhabit." The pandemic-stricken world accelerated the technological “de-bodying” of personal interactions enabled through video calling, messaging, scrolling, and liking. Experiences of intimacy, vulnerability, and sensuality are mediated through monetary and informational corporate exchange. Espezel's artistic practice is an active questioning of this continual de-bodiment.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator