Opening Reception: January 17, 2025 at 5-8PM
Artist Talk and Demo: Saturday January 18, 2025 at 1PM
Exhibition Dates: January 17 – February 22, 2025
Free and open to the public
Exhibition response by Diana Sawatzky
Martha Street Studio is pleased to present Bedfellows, a solo exhibition by Noelle Wharton-Ayer (QC)
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Bedfellows proposes an exploration of the speculative qualities of collage through a combination of drawing and analog and digital photography, creating tensions between images that act as document and those that are imaginary or symbolic. This body of work explores the presence of the botanical in the everyday, and is inspired by spaces of rest, dreaming and inactivity: most notably, the ephemeral but essential leaf litter of terrestrial ecosystems.
The exhibition’s foundation is a suite of silver gelatin photograms created during the winter of 2024, created from collected photographs, observational grease drawings and collaged motifs. These photograms provided the visual material for a series of large-format digital collages, silhouetted soft screens and aluminum cut-outs, creating liminal spaces within the exhibition that toggle between veracity and conjecture. Inspired by the dream-like qualities of the photogram’s surface, the artist envisions this repurposing of photographed materials as an exercise in utopian botanical reimagining.
The artist would like to thank CALQ (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) and VU Photo for their generous support of the creation of this project.
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Artist Statement:
My practice considers the ways in which landscape and the botanical can call us to self-reflection and be used as a point of entry in the construction of personal and familial narratives. My work explores the ways our relationships with natural environments are mediated through distance and the passage of time, creating conversation between exterior botanical spaces and interior emotional states. The image of the botanical is used as a symbolic mechanism for cultivating care and communicating ways of being-in-landscape non-linearly, through feeling and impression.
My work often approaches image-making through collage, sampling images sourced online and from personal archives (family photos, drawings, etc.) and combining and rearranging visual elements in ways that play with scale and repetition. The decorative is also employed as an organizational framework for the enumeration of collected images or information. Combining screen printing, drawing and photography, I am interested in the process of collage as a methodology that engages both real and imaginary spaces, simultaneously activating the mundane and the spectacular. Finally, my work explores the potential of the two-dimensional surface to create space for alternative modes of visual perception, using repetition, distortion, layering, and transparency as visual mechanisms that allude to movement and transformation, soliciting a heightened state of visual attention.
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Bio:
Born in Toronto in 1987, Noelle Wharton-Ayer is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Quebec City. Her practice considers relationships between exterior botanical spaces and interior emotional states, utilizing the collage process as a methodology engaging both real and imaginary spaces. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in visual arts from York University and a Master’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval. Noelle’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Ontario, Quebec, and Europe, including the 7th edition of the Foire en Art Actuel de Québec in 2020 and the 12th edition of the Biennale Internationale d’Estampe Contemporaine de Trois-Rivières in 2021. She has worked as a community arts practitioner in Quebec City since 2019. Her project Bedfellows (supported generously by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) was created and exhibited at the artist-run centre VU Photo in the spring of 2024.