↳ Exhibitions

Jen Aitken and Liam Crockard at Towards

February 24, 2019

Artists: Jen Aitken and Liam Crockard

Exhibition title: Unreliable Objects

Venue: Towards, Toronto, Canada

Date: February 8 – March 2, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Towards, Toronto

Towards is pleased to present Unreliable Objects an exhibition featuring work by Jen Aitken and Liam Crockard.

Consisting of both drawing and sculpture, the work in Unreliable Objects emerges as a response to conditions and limitations the artists employ to help govern the subsequent decision-making process.

For Aitken, this involves a restrained formal vocabulary that she develops through a continuously evolving set of rules. Marks are made intuitively, but conform to a pre-established framework. The drawing surface is persistently reworked as webs of lines are concealed and new marks take their place. This layering and the traces of previous marks create spatial depth and establish a visible and tactile history within each piece.

Crockard’s All Thumbs series evolved out of his interest in “readymade” as well as his back-ground in collage. The earliest forms of the series were constructed from off-cuts sourced from a local trade-school and dumpster diving behind a theatre company near his studio. This found material is then reconstructed into different versions of the most ubiquitous of all design objects – the chair. Through this process, Crockard sets both material and conceptual restraints as a way to complicate and extend the possiblities of making.

Connected through an immediacy and an intuitive way of working, both Aitken and Crockard privilege a kind of experiential and material knowledge, both in the making and the viewing of the work.

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Jen Aitken is an artist based in Toronto. Closely observing the built environment, Aitken makes sculptures and drawings that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She received her MFA in 2014 from the University of Guelph in Ontario, and her BFA in 2010 from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. She was the 2017 recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation and TD Bank Emerging Visual Artist Award, and has received grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto; YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto; Battat Contemporary, Montreal; and Centre Clark, Montreal.

Since graduating from OCADU in 2010, Liam Crockard has been building a multifaceted career of sculpture, collage and photography works examining the nature of work itself, with a particular emphasis on “jerry-rigging” and improvisation as both a symptom and a strategy for art-making and survival alike. He has had solo and group exhibitions at Towards, Cooper Cole, Clint Roenisch, MKG127, Roberta Pelan, and internationally at Gestalten Space (Berlin), West Cork Arts (Ireland), Scott Projects (Chicago), and was a featured artist at the 2017 Material Art Fair in Mexico City. His work has been reviewed and published in Artforum, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine, Elephant Magazine and the Toronto Star. He is currently co-director of The Loon in Toronto and Paper Local, a freely distributed newspaper project.