florescence // Joy Wong

Martha Street Studio is pleased to present florescence, a solo exhibition by Joy Wong.

The grotesque body is one with no beginning or end, and is taking up too much, and one with its environment. In the main gallery, the exhibition is of a body “contaminating” the space. Cut-outs from etchings and lithographs are pasted over each other on the gallery walls, in an expansive collage. In this way, the gallery becomes an activated body, the walls become the surface, the skin. Sculptural acrylic monoprints drape and hang off of copper armatures. The basis of these prints are both loosely referencing bodily imagery (such as wrinkles, puckers, dimples, pimples, etc.) and in ambiguous shapes. This project is also a material investigation, as the ideas of the matrix and multiplicity are integral to the ever-expanding body. The corporeal is highlighted in this project, by the thrusting of the two-dimensional qualities of print into an immersive three-dimensional environment. 
 
Artist statement:
At the intersections of disgust and beauty, decay and decadence, my practice deals with materiality and the physicality of the human body. Personal history informs research about what it means to reckon with a body in space, meditate on the grotesque and abject, and navigate the meeting point of preservation and destruction. My practice has consisted of projects on the human body through a representational or on a phenomenological standpoint. Lately I have been investigating the notion of the matrix, both as the origin of production and the source of multiplication. I am interested in ideas of the grotesque, and in relation to that, the ideas surrounding abjectness, especially from a queer, diasporic perspective. My ongoing research has largely been based on skin – its role as mediator between interior and exterior worlds, and its relationship to the superficial and superfacial of mark-making and printing/painting. The marks on top of and within the layers of skins I create are fragmented and ambulant, with the potential to come together or fall apart. I am particularly invested in production that is in flux- in works that are on the cusp of deteriorating, falling, or ripping, or on the threshold of renewing, blooming, and coalescing.
 
Artist Bio:
Joy Wong (she/they) is an artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto, who works in painting, print media, sculpture, and poetry. Their practice focuses on the intersections of decay and decadence, and connects material investigations with the shifting physicality of the body. Wong was a finalist for the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. She was the 2019 Pope Artist in Residence at NSCAD and has held residencies at St. Michael’s Print Shop in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario. They have received grants from the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 
Wong teaches at NSCAD University and University of Toronto. 

Connect with Joy Wong online at buomhof.com and on Instagram @buomhof.

Martha Street Studio gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council for their dedicated support of our professional programming.