Reception: Saturday, January 11, 2025 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Tonya Corkey: Sweet Dreams
Text by Liuba Gonzalez De Armas
Running counter to the conventional preoccupation with loss of memory, Corkey proposes a meditation on the process and utility of forgetting. Through remembering, we reconsider and reshape memories. Even seemingly innocuous memories can torment when recalled excessively. What is not remembered, whether by choice or by circumstance, can be forgotten. Forgetting enables the mind to sift through what is valuable and what is not, to be rid of what harms, haunts, or otherwise clutters with no reason or lesson.
Tonya Corkey’s use of lint – a recurring material throughout her practice – finds renewed poetic relevance as a material embodiment of memory. Sourced from friends and family, lint carries within it a rich assortment of matter such as textile fibres, hair, dander (dead skin cells), pigments, and other dust particles resulting from human activity. Like soil, lint is an archival material; it indexes and documents one’s day-to-day material reality. As a working material, it possesses remarkable formal versatility which Corkey expertly showcases in this body of work through felting and experimental casting techniques.
Sweet Dreams, the eponymous installation at the centre of the exhibition presents an intimate nocturnal scene featuring a video projection at the head of a quilt-covered double bed. The stop-motion animation video reproduces the panels of the lint-felted quilt atop the bed, which trace the progress of a bat catching and eating moths. Here Corkey articulates memories as nocturnal creatures: flittering bats recall intrusive thoughts, late nights tormented by ruminations of a moment past, doom spiraling. By contrast, the richly-patterned moths embody the delicacy of nostalgic memories. Both bear the muted tones and fuzzy, indeterminate edges of fading memories. The setting of this drama is notable, with the bed being both a place of comfort and of immense vulnerability. Corkey hints at memory’s ability to reassess and adapt itself through recall.
Two Figures Hauling More Than They Can Carry (2022) references the Icelandic folktale of Reynisdrangar, a 216-foot cluster of rock pillars in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Reynisfjara beach. The story goes that these pillars were once trolls who, in an attempt to haul a three-mast ship ashore, were caught out at sea by dawn and instantly turned to stone. Corkey’s retelling, rendered in lint and Icelandic wool, features a series of human figures caught within the silhouette of the rock pillar. All figures are abstracted self-portraits, taken at night and in motion, with only the last figure stepping out of the rock formation. The work likens holding onto certain memories with hauling a cumbersome load and, like the original folktale, cautions against letting a fixation take precedence over survival.
Sweet Dreams features a range of formal interpretations of memory and forgetting, combining the formal versatility and symbolic weight of lint with the narrative whimsy of fables and folktales to deliver subtle and perceptive reflections on life.
