Michelle Mendlowitz
June 25 - August 27, 2022
Reception: Friday, June 24 from 6-9pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto
‘Reflections on Growth’ is a solo exhibition of sculptural ceramic works by Toronto-based artist Michelle Mendlowitz that explores the relationships we have with our bodies. The forms are ambiguous and organic, and their self-containment – each one an enclosed volume – recall internal organs. The gently pinched surface is highlighted by Mendlowitz’s thickly applied glaze that drips down the surface, alluding to flesh and tissue. The glaze colours are unsettling with soft mottled blues and pinks contrasted with an oil-dark glaze suggestive of a creeping necrosis.
The resulting sculptures are at once familiar and alien, beautiful and grotesque. Their discordance is born out of Mendlowitz’s experience of her own body as she coped with recurrent fibroids, which are growths on or in the uterus. Interested in how fibroids grow, Mendlowitz wondered, How do they feed off of me? How do they expand and contract? How do they attach themselves? How do they organically multiply? Mendlowitz’s sculptures speak to the difficulty in reconciling body and mind, particularly in the antagonistic conditions of chronic illness and pain. At the same time, ‘Reflections on Growth’ exemplifies a strategy for reconciliation: in thoughtful and embodied art-making, body and mind become collaborators working through a challenge as one.
Michelle Mendlowitz is a Toronto-based ceramic artist. She received a Bachelor of Design from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2005. Since graduating she has maintained a studio practice making both functional and sculptural objects. Mendlowitz has shown work throughout Canada and the US. She has received awards from Craft Ontario and the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, among others, and grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Craft Ontario. Mendlowitz has taught ceramics in studios across Toronto since 2005 and is currently instructing at OCAD University, the Gardiner Museum, Prosserman JCC, and her studio at 1910 Danforth Ceramics.
michellemendlowitz.com
