Exhibition: Flow - Allyson Clay

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October 13 – November 11, 2023

Flow

Allyson Clay

Opening Reception + Artist Talk: Thursday October 12th at 5pm

Workshop - Working with Text and Image: Sunday October 29th 1-4PM

This exhibition includes a selection of work made through the last 40 years that expresses the breadth of Allyson Clay’s practice. From paintings, photographs, video, and print based works, her work has remained committed to making relationships between images and texts. This small survey shares how this thread is sewn into her work across the years. She is attentive to text as representing a personal voice, in counterpoint to, and as an extension of, the image. Her rule is to not use text as a caption, but as an extension of the possibilities of the image and the total artwork.

Starting out as a painter in the 1980s, Clay moved into more conceptual and text-based works, photography, and video. She has been interested in personal experiences, through movement and thought (particularly feminine), as these approaches garble, and re-invent, alienating modernist spaces such as art galleries and cities. Bodies of her work have also focused on critiquing the notion of “mastery” in art, particularly in painting and traditional art history texts. Currently Clay has been investigating the visual language of resistance and protest in signs and images. Placards and banners are inventive, urgent, and evolving in their use of language and images. We are all implicated, and changed, by the developing forms of calls for action.

Allyson Clay was born in Vancouver, Canada. She has a B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an M.F.A from the University of British Columbia. Recent group exhibitions of her work include, Entangled: Two Views of Contemporary Canadian Painting, Vancouver Art Gallery 2017; The Street, Vancouver Art Gallery 2019, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 2023; Making Space, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia 2021; Beginning with the 70’s: Radical Change, 2018; What is Welcome, Belkin Art Gallery, University of B.C., 2023; and Look Again, Art Gallery of Windsor Essex, 2023.

Clay is represented in collections across Canada including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Yokohama Citizen’s Gallery, Japan, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

The SCAC would like to thank our generous sponsors who make our ongoing work possible: the SCAC Membership, the District of Sechelt, the BC Arts Council, the SC Community Forest Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Sunshine Coast Community Foundation and the Sunshine Coast Credit Union.

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• More Information sunshinecoastartscouncil.com

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Sunshine Coast Arts Council

Our History and Mandate:

The Sunshine Coast Arts Council (SCAC) is a volunteer-based society founded in 1966 to raise the profile of local artists and artisans. Our mandate is to broaden the opportunities for the citizens, artists and artisans of the Sunshine Coast to enjoy and participate in local cultural activities. We are a vital resource for the artistic and cultural life of the Coast community. In addition to operating the Arts Centre which includes two exhibition spaces, a music and visual arts studio, the SCAC hosts ongoing free cultural events. Our mission is to provide opportunities for Coast citizens to enjoy and participate in cultural activities, and to increase platforms for artists and artisans to share their work. We achieve this in a variety of ways including hosting exhibitions, developing public programs, delivering professional development workshops, finding platforms for young people to engage, hosting readings, screenings and talks, and providing accessible space for cultural groups to gather and work. Our annual craft fairs contribute economically and culturally to the creative sector and the broader. We work to make the Arts Centre a welcoming and open gathering place, that is community-minded and accessible for all. We seek to be a creatively vibrant and culturally relevant organisation for audiences and citizens across the Sunshine Coast.

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