Shelby Charlseworth
Francesco Pedraglio
Natalie Gerber
April Matisz

Supporting Ground is the inaugural exhibition at Harm’s Reach, featuring works by Natalie Gerber, April Matisz, Francesco Pedraglio, and Shelby Charlesworth.

In considering this grouping of artists, it was important that the work and conceptual framework of the exhibition reflected the ideas that informed the creation of Harm’s Reach as a project space. The name itself emerged from years spent swimming with my children and repeatedly encountering the familiar warning advising caregivers to keep children within “arm’s reach.” I was always tempted to place an “H” in front of “arm’s” as a joke. Years later, however, the phrase began to take on a different meaning.

As we age, we might think we become more secure in our lives, or attempt to gain greater control over our circumstances, we often find ways to shelter ourselves from the troubles and unpredictability of the world. We might travel differently, taking an Uber instead of public transit, staying in resorts rather than hostels. At home, we might become more selective about who we associate with. As caregivers, we often attempt to protect those in our care by keeping them distant from situations, people, or experiences we perceive as strange, risky, or unfamiliar.

The theorist Viktor Shklovsky famously argued that art makes the familiar strange so that it can be perceived anew. By presenting its material in unexpected or unconventional ways, art interrupts habitual perception and allows us to encounter the world differently. "Harm" may be an intentionally exaggerated term, but there is value in remaining within reach of the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, and even the potentially harmful. As our lives become increasingly isolated and curated, maintaining proximity to difference becomes ever more important. Harm’s Reach seeks to create an accessible community space where encounters with the unfamiliar can foster dialogue, curiosity, and meaningful engagement with others.

Supporting Ground brings together a group of artists whose works, in different ways, engage notions of support. Shelby Charlesworth uses medical and bodily support devices as references for ceramic structures that in turn support bronze-cast worms. Francesco Pedraglio produces drawings of picture frames that support imagined, non-existent works of art. Natalie Gerber examines the impact of memory, perception, and performativity on embodied female experience. While "support" may be a more indirect reading of her work, her delicate suspended forms can be understood as remnants or traces of the psychological and performative structures that sustain identity. Finally, April Matisz’s work on motherhood speaks directly to the complex, demanding, and often invisible forms of support embedded within caregiving.

It should also be noted that Supporting Ground refers not only to the various forms of support explored by the artists, but also to the ground that makes relationship and community possible. Care is the often-unseen foundation of our lives, creating the conditions for connection. This understanding of support is central to Harm’s Reach: not simply as a physical structure or aid, but as a relational practice that makes community possible.

By creating a space that is not only human in scale but also accessible to the surrounding community, Harm’s Reach aims to foster a particular intimacy, one that allows for a reciprocal relationship between the artworks, the space itself, and the people who gather within it.

Shelby Charlesworth

Shelby recently completed an artist residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. There she worked on a number of pieces, some of which will be shown at Harm’s Reach. The lost wax bronze worms with patina on hand-built ceramic support. 

Shelby writes, “My interests lie in the slippage between absence and presence; the ephemeral and fixed. I use porcelain, embroidery, printmaking, textiles, and found objects to create compositions that relate to the temporality and permanence of the body. Tracing spaces once touched, seeking comfort in an absent hand, I ground my work in personal experiences and a larger social context to investigate themes of loss, longing, grief and collective trauma. 

Recent explorations have examined the systemic impact of capitalism creating personal feelings of failure, as well as how perception of failure societally relates to experiences of gender and queer identity. Through mass-production of small, familiar items like buttons, pencils, and handkerchiefs, I repeatedly and laboriously create amassments of delicate objects – emphasizing themes of labour and collective fragilities. These, alongside quilts and other labour-intensive handmade objects, form a large interdisciplinary body of work that underlie the necessity for empathy to understand our weighted world. Cracked flesh, an aching back, still, I must persist.”

www.shelbycharlesworth.com

Francesco Pedraglio

Artist, writer and editor living between Italy and Mexico City, Francesco Pedraglio is interested in storytelling as a tool to decode intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. He looks at how the process of narrating and staging - oneself, or a situation - influences the relationship between teller and listener, making visible the fantasies and fictions that constitute our reality. 

Francesco writes, “In my work, the idea of “frame and framing” has always been present. I come from experimental writing and live performance, primarily spoken word performance. And the idea of defining a stage, framing an action, a scene, has always been part of my Work.

In both live events and videos, I used the concepts of “prospective” and “frame” as conceptual tools to discuss how we—as spectators and listeners—make sense of our surroundings. So, naturally, I also brought these interests with me when I started drawing and painting.

The drawings are always “studies” for future paintings. And in both drawings and paintings, my main interest is in the potential viewer observing them... a viewer as the sole “actor” in the silent performance of observing the drawing/painting and, as such, entering a performative space. Because when a person is looking at a drawing/ painting, he or she is the real protagonist of this little, a-temporary action. In the drawings I sent you, I try to rethink the idea of “frame” both literally (in fact, they are imaginary frames... our mental idea of what a frame might be) and conceptually (I draw them floating in empty space to create a flat object/image that is more of a symbol than a real object).

Once I started drawing them, I also realized they had a kind of resemblance to those frames used on old mirrors... So I decided to leave the center of the image empty precisely to suggest that, as a viewer, you might see yourself reflected in the center of the work.

I’m not entirely sure why that interests me... but I think it somewhat completes the idea of how the act of giving meaning to something also means giving meaning to oneself. And that’s where the title of the drawings comes from.”

Recent exhibitions: MACRO, Rome (2020); Artists’ Film International, GAMEC Bergamo (2020); Norma Mangione Gallery (solo), Turin (2019); Kettle’s Yard (solo), Cambridge (2018); Museo Leonora Carrington (solo), San Luis Potosí (2018); Casa Tomada, Mexico City (2018); Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2017); PAKT, Amsterdam (2017); CRAC Alsazia (2017); Sheffield Fringe, Sheffield (2016); Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca (2015); The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (2015); Kunsthalle Wien (2015).

www.acertainrealism.com
www.johnofthething.net

Natalie Gerber

Natalie writes, "My practice aims to gain a deeper understanding of the female form by investigating the impact of memory, perception and performativity on the embodied female experience. Through a multi-layered dialogue between textiles, porcelain, photography, print media and book arts that is conceived and realized in relation to my own body, I thread together subjectivity and materiality. In this process, I turn to phenomenology which explores the complexity of subject-object relations and the integrated relationships between mind and body, intentionality and action. In exploring these concepts I address reoccurring themes of identity, displacement and orientation within my work, while consider what it is to be a maker. To learn and unlearn yourself is a humbling and vulnerable act. This approach has taught me to see both my work and my own self as something that gathers meaning—forever evolving. Becoming.”

Born in South Africa (Durban), the Calgary-based artist Natalie Gerber began her studies at The Natal Technikon, in Fashion Design. After immigrating to Canada her interests in textiles developed while studying at The Alberta College of Art + Design, and later through postgraduate studies at the London College of Fashion in London (England). Following a decade focused on her design practice in textile printing, the artist earned her MFA in Craft Media from the Alberta University of the Arts. Gerber’s artistic practice addresses the intersection of craft and design, explored through interdisciplinary experimentation and research in textiles, ceramics, photography, print media and book arts.

www.nataliegerber.ca

April Matisz

April writes in response the Motherhood works, “These works were all made from 2017-2018 with the help of a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. In this body of work, I explore the ambivalence of the artist-mother; the suppression of her identity and desire; and the complexity of her relationship to her children, caretaking role, and dominant cultural narratives around feminine identities.”

She states, “My studio practice is rooted in human relationships with the environment. I explore many faucets of this relationship, such as personal and collective concepts of nature; the ways in which nature is disinterested in the human condition; and the cognitive biases and psychology of humans and how it relates to the Anthropocene. Through much of my work I imagine potential worlds that are life-affirming and more knowledgably entangled with ecosystems. I am interested in physical forces that have shaped our world, from the geological to the evolutionary, as well as the phenomenological ways in which we exist and understand ourselves.  With my background in the sciences, I respond to the knowledge science has brought us, while also engaging with the poetic knowledge that the arts provide. Both kinds of knowledge are valid and complementary, and I make this apparent in my practice. 

Painting and drawing are central to my practice. I have also employed printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, installation, and sound works to explore certain ideas. My working method involves thinking through materials. The mark-making I employ and visual imagery I develop emerges as a conversation between myself and the materials.  This dialogue is informed by the way particular colours, forms, and compositions affect my thinking, as well as information that I have gathered and brought into the conversation. From texts and podcasts to social media imagery and walks, the information I seek out and come across daily becomes a secondary type of material that is considered, questioned, and manipulated in my artistic process.”

www.aprilmatisz.net