The latest exhibition at Cre8ery Gallery shows the uniqueness and connectedness of everyday objects, events and subject matter through photography, stained glass, paintings, and visual and mixed media.

Con.Text is a mixed media display featuring work by more than 15 artists. In an e-mail interview, Jordan Miller, curator for the exhibit, wrote about the connection that is placed on the everyday and how that connection is reflected between various art pieces and artists displayed in the exhibition.

“Artists who don’t know one another, or who are not familiar with each other’s works, applied to this call for submission,” Miller wrote. “What we noticed amongst a variety of submissions was how the artwork linked together to build a context to the show. Some of the highlights that stand out are the mediums artists used and how their use is similar to one another from different ways of using text… within their work.”

“ We all seem to highlight that which we take for granted, but which really has a beauty of its own.

Ahniko, artist

An example of this linked connection is Colette Balcaen’s “Pages,” a video of a woman hanging laundry, and Jayne Nixon and Ahniko’s stained glass bowl and poem collaboration, “Emptying the Clothesline” (pictured).

The latter is a stained glass laundry bowl made by Nixon, with a poem written around the edge of the glass by Ahniko about her memory of doing laundry as a chore in her childhood.

With the artists having no previous knowledge of the other’s work, these two pieces further show that everything is connected to something else. Nothing stands alone. The pieces also reflect an undiscovered beauty in the everyday, such as the stained glass laundry bowl seeming to represent an everyday object that is often overlooked.

“It’s pointing out how we inhabit the banal without realizing it. It’s about how we live and inhabit the mundane but we don’t appreciate it,” Ahniko said by e-mail. “We all seem to show that in this exhibit. We all seem to highlight that which we take for granted, but which really has a beauty of its own.”

Con.Text is on display until Feb. 3.

Published in Volume 63, Number 17 of The Uniter (January 22, 2009)