The two-person exhibition, “The End & The Beginning,” with works by Berlin-based, Canadian visual artist Alice Gibney and multimedia American artist Sarah Irvin, addresses themes of life and death.

Irvin’s work in the exhibit revolves around her experience of motherhood and corresponds to birth, or life. Sharing her experience of motherhood and its associated labor, she interprets, manifests and marks life using graphite and data collected on paper. Her Rocking Chair Series (2014) of graphite sketches, index time spent on a rocking chair, caring for her daughter. These were captured through the transfer of graphite as she rocked the chair. By recording this motion, in which she and others sat with her daughter, with the transfer of marks onto paper, the sketches measure time passing in life, of one person caring for another. 

Sarah Irvin, Infant Feeding Log (2018). Both images courtesy of Massey Klein, New York.

Infant Feeding Log (2018), a multimedia sculptural installation by Irvin consists of a rather intimidating catalogue. Recorded on individual index cards, the installation elaborates the specifics and lengths of time for which the artist breastfed her daughter. Complementing her feeding log, a portfolio of codified sketches of ink on paper, Breastfeeding Series (2014), is accompanied by a pair of sketches and catalogue cards framed together. Together, these works capture and illuminate, or at least memorialize, intimate moments of life, which are often lost in the passing of time. In focusing our attention on not just the ephemera, but the actual relations of the individuals involved, she calls attention to the significance of these seemingly simple actions.

The Berlin-based, Canadian visual artist Alice Gibney presents a series of charcoal, ink and pencil sketches, and drawings on paper. These differ in size and follow a logic of coloring, offering richly symbolic depictions of figures that blur the line between dreamlike and reality. 

Gibney’s large sketch, Evolving out of chaos (2014), reveals a woman either turning her head, or double-faced. She is outfitted with an impossible get-up of filled bags or sacs, fake nose and glasses dancing on her hair, hallucinatory. The visual allusions or suggestions evoke whimsy and a consideration of identity.

Opposite Irvin’s records of time, a series of almost 20 charcoal, ink and pencil sketches and drawings by Gibney investigate the considerations introduced in Evolving out of chaos. These are equally absurd, touching and cryptic, served with an underlying melancholy. Most, including Gone Astray, The Forgotten Triplet reaches a conclusion, The Boobhead said nothing interesting (all 2018), depict humanoid figures in expressive postures, wearing absurd, charming getups and props, some body parts blankly uncolored, others emitting a colorful vibrancy. All are hallucinatory, while also possessing some degree of realism. The effect is haunting. Gibney reportedly produced them in response to a personal loss.

Both artists have bared themselves and invited us into their intimate worlds through their art, yet do they remain strangers?  This conundrum would seem worthy of the themes and questions so artfully explored and pondered in and through their work.