Exhibition

The Mouth is about Language. Joyce Wieland in Close-Up

Image: Photo Credits: Image details, left: Joyce Wieland, “Solidarity” [film still]. Courtesy of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, right: Joyce Wieland, “O Canada”. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the NSCAD University Permanent Art Collection, Lithography Workshop. Photography: RAW Photography.

May 27 2019 to Jul 6 2019
Hegelgasse 14
Vienna 1010
Phone: +43 1 236 3775
19:00
Tuesday - Friday:
13:00-19:00
Saturday:
12:00-17:00
Monday, May 27, 2019 to Saturday, July 6, 2019
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„The mouth is about language. Joyce Wieland in Close-Up“
with artworks by Joyce Wieland and Elisabeth Kihlström
curated by Bettina Brunner

Opening: May 27, 2019, 7 pm
Welcome: Alexandra Grausam
Introduction: Kelly Anderson (Counsellor of the Embassy of Canada to Austria)
Bettina Brunner in conversation with the artist Elisabeth Kihlström
Duration: May 28 – July 06, 2019

Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland (1930–1998) is widely known as a key protagonist of the New York film avantgarde of the 1960s. Despite Wieland's important role within Canadian art history, the international reception of her work rarely mentions the diversity of media she drew on in her artistic practice, ranging from painting and prints to sculpture and, above all, textile works.

The exhibition focusses on Joyce Wieland's work of the 1960s and 70s, providing an insight into the use of language within her artistic and filmic practice. The motif of lips appears as the embodied site of speech in a series of prints, including the well-known lithograph „O Canada“ (1970), and on a large-scale quilt. These works point to the artist's engagement with questions of national identity, feminism and environmentalism, whereas her short films articulate her politics in terms of the relationship between image and text, between a filmic narrative and aesthetics. Including published material andunpublished archival items, Joyce Wieland's writings and drawings not only show her interest in the everyday and the biographical but also highlight her international connections. Her idiosyncratic sense of humour underlines the artist's and filmmaker's affective relationship with the subjects discussed in her works, ranging from factory workers on strike and the Canadian landscape to her domestic cats.

Through her exhibition display, which integrates a new textile piece into the show, artist Elisabeth Kihlström enters into a dialogue with Joyce Wieland's artworks. Focussing on connections to her own work, Elisabeth Kihlström presents her interpretation of key concerns in Joyce Wieland's practice such as materiality, temporality and the relationship between cinema and exhibition environments. In her artistic practice, Elisabeth Kihlström connects exhibited objects, audiences and space through the interplay of materials, colours, texture and light.

Thanks to all lenders and participants in the exhibition: Arnold Matthews, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank / Banque d’art du Conseil des arts du Canada, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections

Image: Photo Credits: Image details, left: Joyce Wieland, “Solidarity” [film still]. Courtesy of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, right: Joyce Wieland, “O Canada”. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the NSCAD University Permanent Art Collection, Lithography Workshop. Photography: RAW Photography.