Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present Toronto-based artist’s Tania Kitchell’s first solo-show with the gallery.
Kitchell’s new photography and text work in Lightness explore her ongoing fascination with the environment and climate, and specifically the spontaneity of weather and her perception and relationship with it.
The photographs in Kitchell’s series present us with a natural environment which Kitchell proceeds to interact with, sculpturally devise and reclaim her own. Set in a park on a cloudy autumn day, Kitchell injects constructed white and black cloud-like props into the picture, establishing in the natural and artificial clouds an aesthetic materiality and metaphorical resonance of lightness. Kitchell’s nylon clouds dance in the picture frame and at times Kitchell herself intervenes, flying them like kites or being pursued by one while riding a bicycle. For Kitchell, aside from being objects of play, the clouds relate to a certain state of mind. The overall feeling is one of lightness and buoyancy, undercutting the ever-consuming weight and threat of the dark clouds lingering in the sky above.
Kitchell’s accompanying text works instill a certain ambiguity around the images allowing their meanings to proliferate. She sat in a cloud of fog/and waited for a lift Hence, there is a subtle disassociation of what we see and what the text says, evoking extended thoughts reminiscent of the playfulness of the works and the experience of the artist herself.
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