MARGIE KELK
SWARF
OCTOBER 9 - NOVEMBER 2, 2013
OPENING RECEPTION OCTOBER 18, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present SWARF, an exhibition by artist Margie Kelk. Kelk has spent many years observing the workings of a machine shop. Her recent work operates within the interstices of flesh and machinery. Each contaminates the other: machinic ‘swarf,’ or peelings ground away from the Matrix, intersects with skin-like surfaces forming the foundation of much of the work. This isn’t a cybernetic dream of prosthetic or embodied machines; instead, it’s a deeper scraping away of biological and mechanical realms that leaves neither intact. The world is entangled to its detriment, and there’s no easy way out.
-Alan Sondheim
Margie Kelk's artistic practice reflects contemporary concerns about cultural history and politics. She takes an exploratory and experimental approach as she appropriates and reconstructs visual fragments of ideas through diverse artistic media. which include ceramic sculpture, drawing and painting, video and photography. She has traveled extensively in China and Latin America, and much of her earlier artistic production revolved around the cultures of these two regions. Concern over the alienation which affects so many people in today's world of social media networks led Kelk to direct her attention to the plight of disconnected individuals living on the edge of society. In 2012, she produced a series of encaustic drawings, and over 200 ceramic heads, individuals without bodies,--which stood in definite tension with the environment surrounding them. She is now exploring the relationship which exists between the mechanical and the human. Her works are a reflection on contamination, the interstices of flesh and machinery, a scraping away of biological and mechanical realms that leaves neither intact.
Kelk has been exhibiting her artwork in Canada since 2000. She was on the Board of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto, Ontario) for eight years, and was Chair for six of them. Since 2009 she has been an active member of Red Head Gallery (Toronto), and she is now gallery Chair. She is also represented in Florida, USA, by the Dixie Art Loft in West Palm Beach, and the Clay Glass Metal Stone Gallery in Lake Worth. Her China-based books and drawings were represented by the Headbones Gallery in Toronto in 2006-7, and she was a member of Gallery 1313, also in Toronto, from 2003 until 2007. She has received prizes for several of her works, and has been awarded grants by the Ontario Arts Council. Margie is a graduate of Wellesley College, The Johns Hopkins University (PhD.), and the Toronto School of Art degree program.
