SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Ann Marie Hadcock
Sophia Solaris

January 2013

We open the new year with a two-person show featuring recent work by German artist Sophia Solaris and Bruce Peninsula artist Ann Marie Hadcock. Both emerging artists re-evaluate the use of everyday materials and their potential to transcend their original function. Both employ tedious manual processes to transform materials into new structures and shapes.

Solaris works within a modernist tradition of geometric, non-objective art reminiscent of early abstractionists Mondrian and Malevich. While these artists worked in paint, Solaris re-imagines prosaic objects like milk cartons and construction material, transforming them from their original function into calming vistas of linearity. Making use of the detritus of contemporary products, she subtly subverts the noise and busyness of everyday life into tranquil and contemplative sculptural images. The disorder of debris is ordered into a harmonic visual language which utilizes minimal information to bring about feelings of serenity in the viewer.

Hadcock engages in cross-disciplinary art-making processes that blur the boundries between sculpture, installation, drawing and craft. Like Solaris, Hadcock is also interested in re-working materials so that they gain new life in an entirely different context. By manipulating the materials in novel juxtapositions, she seeks to alter their conventional characteristics in ways that are fresh and unexpected. Viewers will find themselves intrigued and puzzled by these artworks, and compelled to interact with them through touch or moving through their physical space. Blending unexpected materials like fibre, wire mesh, branches, and steel wool, Hadcock plays with ambiguity and incongruity to provoke curiosity and surprise.

Hadcock was born in Hamilton and has degrees in art from Fanshawe College, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Windsor. Recent solo shows include Continuum in 2009 and SymBEotic at Harbourfront Centre in 2011. Hadcock currently resides in Wiarton.

Sophia Solaris was born in Germany and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe in 2011. She had her first solo exhibition in Canada at Cambridge Galleries in 2011 and currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario.