MFA Thesis One exhibition

Opening Reception: Thursday April 11, 5:00–8:00 pm. Performance: Customer Service by Patrick Allaby, 6:00 pm.

Gallery One

Lauren Prousky: JunkDrawerPhantomDressUpSoirée

JunkDrawerPhantomDressUpSoirée analyzes the archive as a malleable tool for art making through the creation of a personal archive comprised of concepts for images that were then used to construct various projects over a two-year period. Combining sculptures, paintings, drawings and text, the archival form becomes the groundwork for storytelling and poetry, subverting the idea that the archive is something statically formal, bureaucratic or paramount to its anarchival byproducts. The poetic archive creates an evolving network within the exhibition space, where meaning is continually wrapped around the archive and subsequent projects through a non-hierarchical gathering of materials, text and images.

Lauren Prousky is an MFA candidate at the University of Waterloo and holds a BFA in studio art and English literature from Concordia University. She has shown her work in Montreal and Toronto, and has participated in residencies in Iceland, British Columbia and Brooklyn. She was awarded a Shantz International Research Scholarship through the University of Waterloo, and worked with artist Rachel Eulena Williams in Brooklyn during the summer of 2018. You can follow her @laurenprousky on Instagram where you can send her your favourite videos of cuttlefish changing colour. She loves those. www.laurenprousky.com

Gallery Two

Patrick Allaby: Customer Service

Customer Service is a 30-minute autofictional hand-drawn slideshow consisting of around three hundred and fifty drawings that explore that most ubiquitous twenty-first century labour experience: the call centre. Call centre employees are both dehumanized by callers fed up with waiting for hours on hold, and by their employers, who are eager to process calls at ever increasing rates. Customer Service weaves personal and political criticisms together against late capitalism, and focuses on the difficulty of reducing one’s self to the flesh appendage of a computer, a creature whose only function is to deliver algorithmic logic with an empathetic tone. Customer Service combines the artist’s interests ranging from pop music, cinema, early animation, experimental theatre, literature and comics into one cohesive work.

Patrick Allaby is an MFA candidate at the University of Waterloo. He was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick and holds a BFA from Mount Allison University in Sackville. In 2016, he curated an exhibition of contemporary comic art, The Sensual World, at the Owens Art Gallery, and has performed at various music and art festivals, including Flourish, Ok Quoi?! and Third Shift. He was awarded a Shantz International Research Scholarship through the University of Waterloo, and worked with artist Gabrielle Bell in Brooklyn during the summer of 2018. You can follow him @patrickallaby on Instagram. www.patrickallaby.com