Please join us in welcoming Haley Uyeda to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program! To learn more about Haley Uyeda’s artistic practice and her plans for the artist studio, visit her profile and read her blog post below!
Hello RMG community! Thank you for this opportunity to work in your studio through the winter months. I’m so looking forward to spending some concentrated time in this studio and to have the dedicated space and quiet to sort through some of my archival materials from past work and personal archives that I’m hoping to reacquaint myself with.
For those who are new to my work, it most often takes the form of paintings that are meticulously cut in simple shapes and repetitive patterns that allow light to filter through the work and cast gradients of shadow and colour on the walls upon which they’re exhibited. Over the years, I’ve started to consider my work as tools that could be used in other ways to filter light and create new work. I was making photographs that used my paintings as screens, creating patterns of shadow on various surfaces and filming clips of them to make a short video work when I was in grad school.
Some examples of my past work at various stages, from in-progress stills to finished works.
I’ve been thinking of my practice as one that is built on the consideration of a self-generating methodology, where one work creates the next. In this way, all of my work has a certain lineage that ties it to a past work. For this iteration of that lineage, during my time as the artist in residence, my work will focus on the remnants of past work that I’ve collected over the years. Every piece of canvas that I’ve removed from my paintings, cutting out from the surface, I’ve kept in various envelopes knowing that one day I’d like to use these offcuts as the basis for new work. The time has finally come to parse through these materials and create new works on paper and perhaps a large-scale work on fabric. I’m hoping to explore some new techniques and material explorations while given this studio time.
A selection of offcuts from past paintings.
In thinking about the way that I make work, I’ve been interested in the notion of sensibility. I feel like the way that I make work and what sparks my interest in other work is a curiosity or discovery of a person’s sensibilities. Sensibility, deriving from Latin “sensibilis,” meaning “that can be perceived by the senses,” I understand sensibility as being a sort of catchall term that reflects in some part a person’s aesthetics, ethics and personality. I consider how one navigates and responds to the world, the things they inherit, the decisions they make, their personal inclinations and preferences, their morals and sensitivities, and the things they’re drawn to, to amount to a reflection of a sensibility. Perhaps I’m loading this one word down with too much weight in capturing all of this, but I’m intrigued to consider further this notion of a sensibility as I work in the studio over the next few months. I also wonder then, what becomes excluded from the understanding of a personal sensibility and how do they become defined? What differentiates a visual sensibility from an aesthetic? My intentions for the residency are to explore what encompasses a sensibility. I would like to research and explore the conceptualization, visualization and sentiment that entail a sense of a personal sensibility.
If this is also of interest to you, please schedule a time to come chat with me in the studio!
