EAT YOUR TAIL

Chrome Destroyer, Maya Gauvin, Teresa Holly, and Evan Sproat

Curated by Chelsea Yuill

14 Dec 2019 to 22 Feb 2020

Unraveling subtleties of the unconscious, the four artists in EAT YOUR TAIL craft self-portraits that act as two-way mirrors into self-contained worlds. Informed by historical influences, mythological ruminations, and objects of metamorphosis, each artwork reveals the legacy of supernaturalism and its tie to the fraught wisdom of the imagination. Poking around for different kinds of truth, they ask,

“how do we make visible what is beyond observable?” 

Extracting from the material lineages of clay as repository, relic, and technological tool, Maya Gauvin navigates the interstices of personal narrative, historical archetypes and world-creating myths. Chrome Destroyer’s 3D graphic images combine Western Classical forms with elements of the cyborg and the seductive language of advertising to express the anxieties of being human in a consumerist and technologically-driven culture. Teresa Holly illustrates imagined beings drawn in malleable and grotesques poses with masked, stacked, exchangeable heads that all together ooze a sense of social performance—are they exposing or concealing their hidden selves? Labour-intensive textile mediums (felting, soft sculpture, costume) are a therapeutic exercise for Evan Sproat who creates toy-like objects that address socio-political traumas and rework ideas of morality and sexuality in an effort to formulate new foundations for human relationships.

Using paper, 3D graphics, performance, textiles, and ceramic, these artists invite us to dive into the well of the collective unconscious to see what it holds.


BIOS

MAYA GAUVIN works with sculpture, ceramics, installation and textiles. Often drawing from visual and material histories of archaeology, votive objects and reliquaries, archetypal systems and craft technologies, her works consider ways of knowing which chart time and space via material memory. Her installations serve as repositories, offering potential tools for divination and truth-telling through physical, chemical, spiritual and economic permutations of disparate materials. She studied Print Media and Linguistics at Concordia University, and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Better known under the pseudonym of CHROME DESTROYER, Drake Pickel is an emerging visual artist who uses 3D software to play with classical understandings of light, space, and the human form. The aesthetic push and pull of seduction and repulsion in his images express the absurdity and anxiety of being human in the 21st century. Pickel received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is based in Vancouver, BC. 

TERESA HOLLY is a visual artist born and raised in Portland, Oregon. After graduating High School in 2011 she moved up to Vancouver, Canada to study at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Graduating from ECUAD in 2015 with a Bachelors of Illustration, Holly remains in Vancouver and continues her illustrative practice through drawings, tattoos, and more recently sculpture.

Through a playful explorations of installation, performance, craft, soft sculpture, print, and woodworking, EVAN SPROAT uses time-intensive mediums as a therapeutic exercise to consider his position within the context of contemporary identity politics. Particularly, his use of play and toy-like objects are used to address socio-political traumas, embed certain ideas of morality and sexuality with aims to formulate a new foundation for how people might interact in the real world. Sproat is a prairie-raised, Vancouver based artist who holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. 

CHELSEA YUILL is an emerging curator and textile artist. She explores weaving, embroidery, and reworking clothes to reflect upon feminine mythologies, the lineage of womxn’s work, the slipperiness of romance, and the absurdity in everyday life. These themes fold into her curatorial work as a way to connect to contemporary art practices to engage the public in surprising and thought provoking ways. Yuill holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019) with a focus on curatorial practices, and is based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Currently, she is the festival coordinator at Capture Photography Festival. 

 

(Photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

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The research and development of this curatorial project was made possible by internship funding from Young Canada Works at Building Careers in Heritage through the Department of Canadian Heritage.