in: flux
Margie Kelk

SEPTEMBER 8 TO 18, 2021

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present In: FLUX, an exhibition by Margie Kelk.

Trips to Antarctica over the past two years have informed my current artistic output.  Inspired by the geography, flora and fauna found in South Georgia Island and the Antarctic peninsula, I have studied scientific reports about the feasibility of life continuing under the adverse conditions brought on by climate change in these regions. Scientists have not yet discovered all of the possible life forms living in the southern oceans, and they are not sure how current life forms may adapt to the changing conditions. I am creating my own series of possible life forms in the hopes that something may survive.

Included in the exhibition is the short film, Half of Everything with a musical score created by Ian Kelk, which has been accepted into more than 16 film festivals around the world, the 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival (Bali, Indonesia), the Black Swan International Film Festival (Kolkata, India), the Berlin International Art Film Festival (Berlin, Germany), the Amsterdam Short Film Festival, June Edition (Amsterdam, Holland), and the Toronto Indie Short Film Festival online, to name but a few.

When will I learn to go without leaving footprints?
By Thomas Merton

When word came,
we tried reasoning with the darkness.
We started.
We stopped.

Tidal.

The melting in-differences.
Some will cause & threaten.
No.
All will.
Then we had white walls.
Now,
we have a sense of gone gone before the Moon,
its range & trials.
All’s not well.

We may turn,
being somewhat about,
but we’re dreaming, we are,
of the shrinking window,
of the very weight of the extinctions,
of their melting in-differences.

Tense words in the air.
Long keening sounds.
All’s not well.
Not well at all.

— Gil McElroy

Gil McElroy is a poet, visual artist, curator, and visual arts critic.

BIOGRAPHY

Toronto-based multi-media artist Margie Kelk takes an exploratory and experimental approach as she appropriates and reconstructs visual fragments of ideas through diverse media that include ceramic, bronze and aluminum sculpture, drawing, and animation.

UnderSee (2018), an animated film co-directed by Margie Kelk and Lynne Slater has been screened in over 60 film festivals nationally and internationally including the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California, USA; Beyond the Curve International Film Festival, Hôtel Paris Lafayette, Paris, France; and the Portugal International Film Festival at the Pestana Palacio do Freixo, Porto, Portugal.

Margie Kelk’s first award-winning stop-motion animated film, Substratae (2015) has been featured in over seventy film festivals nationally and internationally including The New Renaissance Film Festival, London, UK; and the New York State International Film Festival, in Albany, New York.

Kelk is a graduate of Wellesley College, the Johns Hopkins University (PhD.), and the Toronto School of Art diploma programme. She is represented by reference: contemporary, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and is a member of the Red Head Gallery, Toronto.

For more information visit: www.margiekelk.com
@MargieKelk|#MargieKelk