Elspeth Pratt: Nonetheless

February 1 - March 6, 2011

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, is proud topresent NONETHELESS, the first U.S. solo exhibition of Vancouver BC sculptor Elspeth Pratt, an artist who has had a deep impact on Vancouver’s internationally-recognized visual arts culture. In the words of writer Robin Laurence, “Elspeth Pratt is one of Canada’s most accomplished and possibly least-appreciated sculptors. Her materials and scale are intentionally non-heroic, her forms are subtle and understated, and yet her ideas possess both heft and depth. Through her art, Pratt grapples with complex problems concerning the built environment.” NONETHELESS features Pratt’s most recent work.

Tuesday, February 1 at 6:00 pm, Artist Talk in Eliot Hall, Room 314
Followed by an open house at the Cooley. Light refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

On view Tuesday, February 11—Sunday, March 6
The Cooley Gallery is open every week, Tuesday through Sunday, from 12:00—5:00 pm. Free and open to the public.

Pratt’s sculptural works use common building or household materials to engage complex ideas of architecture and social space. Her materials question ideas of value and permanence associated with sculpture, while her subject matter negotiates the line between abstraction and representation. Pratt’s sculptures almost always articulate their interdependence at the margins and intersections of space, expressing an ethos of graft that resists rational hierarchies. Pratt’s preoccupation with the touching, joining and grafting of commonplace materials, evidences her commitment to experimentation, interconnectedness and humility.

These humanistic/aesthetic predilections are evidenced by Pratt’s preoccupation with the architectural practices of poor and marginalized communities, in which material ingenuity becomes a semiotic register of forms of social interaction. Pratt’s recent work considers public space and architecture and their relationship to human circumstances. The diverse sources in Pratt’s work range from the buildings and plans of Toyo Ito, Shigeru Ban, and Le Corbusier, to Brazilian favelas, to actual buildings under construction in Vancouver.

Over the twenty-five years that Pratt has been making art, she has developed a thoughtful sculptural language that examines the structures and “failures” of various materials and architectural forms. Pratt combines materials in unusual ways, often pitting structure against softness—planarity against dimensionality. Pratt forgoes materials’ common uses to suggest new possibilities. As the exhibition title implies, there is more than one way to accomplish something. It is here, in the potential for other possibilities, that Pratt situates herself.

Elspeth Pratt has been exhibiting since 1983. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery, YYZ (Toronto), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge). She has exhibited in group shows in Canada, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and Italy; among these are Weak Thought at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Architettura: Astriazione in Rome, and Contingent: Eva Hesse, Elspeth Pratt, and Martha Townsend at the Dunlop Art Gallery. Pratt is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the VIVA Award in 1993.

NONETHELESS is curated by Kathy Slade, Editor, Emily Carr University Press. The exhibition is a collaboration between Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC, and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. A four-color exhibition catalog, edited by Kathy Slade with essays by Lisa Robertson, Matthew Stadler, Stephanie Snyder, and others, will be published by the Emily Carr University Press in February, 2011. A separate press release will accompany the book launch event in late February.