CALGARY, Alberta, Nov. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- From powerfully intimate portraits to site specific fabric installations, Contemporary Calgary is thrilled to announce three outstanding solo exhibitions by Canadian artists Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Corri-Lynn Tetz and Maya Beaudry presented by RBC. Opening November 4, 2021, these three exhibitions underpin a deeper understanding of feminine perspectives and share a tactile synergy across the artists’ respective mediums of drawing, painting, textile, photography and sculpture.

“We are excited to showcase the work of these three exceptionally talented artists. Simone Elizabeth Saunders’ powerful, tufted portraits emphatically raise the voices of Black lives; Corri-Lynn Tetz’s works transform magazine erotica into seductive and painterly images; and, Maya Beaudry fuses organic growth to manufactured structures with a rainbow of puffed fabrics. Together, these exhibitions share a sensibility, an intimacy, and a layered complexity that we’re confident visitors will enjoy.”

—Ryan Doherty, Curator, Contemporary Calgary

“RBC is committed to supporting the arts communities who enrich and inspire us all, and we are proud to support the exceptional programming brought forward by Contemporary Calgary. These exhibitions reflect a considered approach to representing breadth of perspectives, while also enabling audiences to engage deeply with each artist's intents and practices in their solo exhibitions. This trio of curated exhibitions by Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Corri-Lynn Tetz and Maya Beaudry, highlights the depth of research and explorations in their respective mediums. Their individual explorations create a constellation of perspectives that support a deeper understanding of identity in relation to materiality and form.”

—Corrie Jackson, Senior Art Curator, RBC

Simone Elizabeth Saunders: u.n.i.t.y.

Simone Elizabeth Saunders explores personal history, Afro-diaspora, and Black sisterhood through bold and colourful textiles. Borrowing motifs and iconography from her Jamaican heritage, art history, literature, music and current events, she creates tufted portraits of singular figures, each a montage of powerful, inspirational Black bodies that collectively surface as a strong and resilient community. There is an unabashed presence common throughout all her works, at once challenging the viewer and demanding to be seen. As much as these powerful portraits connote Black joy and resilience, it is how they are woven together into narratives of connection that, for Saunders, offers herself and others a potent sense of belonging.

“It means so much for my textiles to be seen. The narratives within my artworks celebrate and uplift the joys, strengths and resilience of Black womanhood”

—Simone Elizabeth Saunders

Corri-Lynn Tetz: Art Lover

Corri-Lynn Tetz works as a painter, focusing on the female figure as a way to explore identity, sensation and desire. Borrowing from personal archives, fashion photography, film and pornography, she is interested in the ways images and meaning are transformed through painting and how this process disrupts notions of the gaze to re-imagine pictorial space.

Invested in ritual, communal intimacy and strange mystical events, Tetz’s paintings are drawn from the romantic histories of a figure in landscape and the seemingly endless possibilities of surface and form. Evoking memory or a distant, artificial arcadia, the effect is often more poetic than narrative - with bodies and nature activated through inventive figuration, high key and muted colour combinations, abstract interventions and intuitive gestures. Tetz’s works speak to the history of painting, assumptions of viewership and authorship, as well as the ways she sees the performance of femininity both absorbed and rejected.

"My goal with paintings is to seduce the viewer with brushmarks, form and colour. At the same time, I want them to be funny and tender—particularly to those who’ve negotiated the complicated performativities of femininity and gender.”

—Corri-Lynn Tetz

Maya Beaudry: The Pergola

Maya Beaudry’s site-specific installation The Pergola considers the idea of interiority and containment as it relates to the natural and the built environment. Wrapped in a fabric printed with photographs of dwelling spaces, and buttressed by an organic wire growth, the pergola offers a structural fluidity of being between inside and outside; and between intention and spontaneity.

Beaudry’s practice draws largely on the language of patterns in urban design and architecture. Fused with organic interruptions, she complicates the logic of the grid - that pervasive infrastructure that has become synonymous with urban living, from the block, and city to the pixels on our screens. The Pergola then can also be understood as a portrait of a hypercomplex system that mediates planned and entropic growth, safety and entanglement. It is a way to find meaning in how we inhabit spaces.

The pergola, Maya says, sounds like something between purgatory and parabola. The pergola surrounds—sonically, structurally. For our purposes, the pergola is a stand-in for Structure in general, where human scale meets the meta human propensity for growth—the way the roses climb our vision.
—Excerpt from the text by Kayla Ephros

All three exhibitions will run until January 30, 2022 at Contemporary Calgary (701 11 Street SW). Single admission is $10, annual admission memberships are just $20 and children 12 and under are free. Visit contemporarycalgary.com to learn more.

Media Contact
Kate Silver
kate@contemporarycalgary.com
403-861-7985

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at

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https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/05e0a5e6-1cec-4a0f-9e20-5caea3e973c2

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