Grebel Gallery Exhibit | New Fraktur

Monday, May 6, 2019 — 8:30 AM to Friday, October 25, 2019 — 6:00 PM EDT

Meg Harder is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in the Grand River Watershed. Harder graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Waterloo, which included a six month exchange at Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. She studied under Paula Wilson at Haystack Mountain school of crafts in 2018. She was the 2015 Eastern Comma Artist in Residence at Rare Charitable Research Reserve and at Vermont Studio Centre in 2018. She has exhibited at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area, and The Museum, Kitchener. She is a recent recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Project Grant.

Harder's present research focuses on artistic practices that expand and disrupt canonized art forms and narrative genres to express emerging realities and revisionist histories. She draws on fraktur folk art, an imaginative and densely detailed illuminated calligraphy, historically produced by early Mennonite settlers to Ontario. Fraktur was traditionally made to venerate important religious and cultural texts and was displayed in everyday contexts like the walls of homes and in the covers of bibles and hymnals. In recognition of her ancestral traditions, her ink and gouache drawings carry forward the aesthetic sensibilities of fraktur and Biblical myth, while reframing their contents with a queer, feminine, and bioregional optic. By reinterpreting these archived images in a personal lexicon of motifs and symbols to create fictive environments, she aims to disarm exploitative narratives and create space for new histories and futures.

New Fraktur exhibit