Lump, Slump, Sunk

Opening Reception: April 7 from 2:00-4:00 pm

Hamilton Artists Inc. is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Guelph based artist Adrienne Spier.

Lump, Slump, Sunk is a sculptural installation exploring the shifting value of discarded objects and the space they occupy. The three elements— a broken floor, melted bottles and warped furniture— are fastened, heated and soaked to minimize or maximize their mass. Spier chose these materials because they are ubiquitous, familiar and often discarded. The re-constructed floor made from discarded parquet flooring heaves and buckles, disrupting our implicit trust in the stability of foundations. The beer bottles, now slumped into space saving puddles, were occupying precious real estate in a collector's garage, highlighting tensions between the sentimental and the practical. They can't even be turned in for a deposit. The found particleboard furniture is re-presented as a series of tilting sculptures, made by slicing the material into strips, selectively bloating and piling the pieces. The expansions equal only millimetres, but the stacks appear visibly off kilter. These properties— bloating, slumping, and buckling— are mirrored and therefore understood in our own bodies. Small changes, when accumulated, become significant. The series investigates the phase of a material’s existence after something useful has become useless.

The exhibition is accompanied by critical essays by Emily Rosamond. The publication can be downloaded HERE. To read the extended version of the publication essay by Emily Rosamond please click HERE.

Adrienne Spier (b. Montreal) is a Guelph-based multidisciplinary artist who works with discarded and unwanted materials. Spier received an MFA from Concordia University, completed the Independent Studio Program at the Toronto School of Art, and has a BA in Fine Art from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Calgary, Rouyn-Noranda, Guelph, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and Berlin, Germany. She has taken part in numerous residencies in both Ontario and Quebec, including the Hamilton Artists Inc. Cotton Factory Residency and the Gibraltar Point International Artists Residency. She is the recipient of various awards from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Her work is held in both private and public collections.

Emily Rosamond is a Canadian artist, writer and educator. She is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is Joint Programme Leader on the BA Fine Art and History of Art. She completed a practice-based Art PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar at Goldsmiths in 2016. Her recent work explores character and reputation as speculative logics of assetized, online personhood, and draws from contemporary art history, literary theory, critical finance and digital media studies. Emily guest lectures widely (recently at the ICA, London; FACT, Liverpool; and Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam) and has exhibited most recently at the Leu Gallery, Nashville (2018), Karst, Plymouth (2017) and ASC Gallery, London (2017). Recent writings have been published in Paragrana, Finance and Society, the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Moneylab Reader and Liverpool University Press.

The artist would like to acknowledge project funding from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.