Emily MacDonald & Tegan Bowers; Leila Plouffe & Jacob Dutton | Gilding

May 13 – June 18, 2016

Opening reception and performance | Friday, May 13 at 7 pm

Discussion with the artists | Thursday, May 19 at 6:30 pm

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From Shakespeare’s King John springs a cliché of superfluous improvement on beauty: ‘to gild a lily’—a misquote, a weightless claim to the truth of a thing. Emily MacDonald and Tegan Bowers work instead with roses: in performance, they consume the complicated influence of art- history giant and fascist-misogynist Marinetti one bite at a time—consuming roses covered in sheets of golden batter described in his recipe for Diabolical Roses. Their absurd act marks a struggle between autonomy over their own ideas of queer feminine identity and complacency with patriarchal representations of women. Leila Plouffe and Jacob Dutton make images and objects about the act of clothing: bodies draped with lustrous sheets, seeming to transform into domestic objects and architecture. Their mixed-media work shimmers and breathes, including photography, video, and sculpture, continuing themes of domestic spaces and performing the personal in furniture and dress.