Opening + Artist Talk: March 3, 2024, 1-4pm (Artist Talk at 2pm)
Ceramic tiles have been used in architectural and interior design for thousands of years. They are found in the most private of spaces and where we gather with others. In this exhibition, Kendra Yee adopts clay tiles as a medium for expressing reverence for the ways memories function in our private and public lives. In particular, Commonplace explores how the memories we hold onto make us who we are and how sharing those stories with others binds us together.
During Yee’s residency at the RMG, community members gifted her their personal memories through online and paper submission forms and in-person workshops. In the studio, she spent time with each memory – observing how she felt, what she saw, what she read – before decorating each tile using a variety of surface design techniques inspired by the submission’s mood or event. After translating well-over 100 ethereal recollections into unique physical engravings, Yee has placed them on a long table draped in a white cloth in an archive of sorts. Laid side by side, the tiles invite remembrance and infinite speculation; they might even spur new stories as you wander from one to the next.
Making this work, Yee was curious about how we remember events from our past. She asked questions like: What does it mean to make a memory? What happens when you tell a story over and over? What about the things you can’t remember? Naming the exhibition Commonplace, Yee reflects on the power of storytelling to produce common ground for seeing and taking care of one another. She also points to the way common, everyday objects can act as souvenirs, reminding us of special people and places, or evoking vague or visceral feelings. Translating the memories she received through her personal lens, she also now holds the story fragments in herself, along with the embodied experience of making the tiles in clay. This creative act of translation is an homage to the mysterious, illusive, and persistently transformative nature of memory.
Kendra Yee (b. 1995, Tkaronto/Toronto) is an arts practitioner who seeks to materialize the truths and fictions of memory. Yee pulls tales from personal stories, lived experience and collective narratives to develop site-specific installations that carve alternative archives. Yee has programmed and exhibited with: The Art Galley of Ontario, MOCA (Toronto), Art Toronto, Patel Brown (Toronto), Heavy Manners (Los Angeles), The Artists Project (Toronto), Juxtapoz (NYC), The Letter Bet (Montreal), and Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto).
This program is supported by the RBC Foundation’s RBC Emerging Artist Project.
The artist gratefully acknowledges support from the Canada Council for the Arts for this exhibition.
Installation of Commonplace at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2024. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.
