…with all the amenities…

Barbara Hobot
Lisa Hirmer

January 2008

…with all the amenities… combines the sensual, often disturbing, fabric constructions of Kitchener artist and independent curator Barbara Hobot with stark photographs of suburban developments by Guelph architecture student Lisa Hirmer. The combination triggers a poetic reflection on ideas of style, elegance and individuality within a sprawling suburban context. Hirmer’s scenes of stripped farm fields awaiting new housing and Hobot’s sheepskin construction present a highly manipulated nature, a nature constricted and forced into artificial patterns. Hobot’s monumental sheepskin ‘crown’ wall hanging offers a triumphant, twisted take on a space of manufactured, artificial elegance–a craft project gone horribly awry. Hirmer’s clean clear landscapes, present not the blank void of an empty space (with no history waiting to be filled), but a site of erasure, a place emptied of its uniqueness.

Curated by Andrew Hunter, …with all the amenities… features the work of two individuals who have developed their work within the context of the University of Waterloo. Barbara Hobot is a graduate of the University of Waterloo’s Department of Fine Arts (2005). Since graduating she has exhibited regularly within the Waterloo Region and has worked in a curatorial and programming capacity at Render, The Kitchener Waterloo Children’s Museum and at the Blackwood Gallery (UofT Mississauga). Lisa Hirmer is currently a candidate in the Masters program of the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture. An accomplished photographer, her thesis focuses on the significance of nature and wilderness to popular understandings of Canadian history and identity.

Andrew Hunter is the Director/Curator of Render, the University of Waterloo’s innovative arts based exhibition, production and research centre. As an artist, curator and writer, he has produced exhibitions and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. He has written extensively on issues of nature, the landscape, the environment and history within a Canadian context and with a particular emphasis on suburban development.