We can only hint at this with words.

Russna Kaur
M.E. Sparks
Andrea Taylor

There is a slowness that happens in the body when we can’t quite name what we’re looking at. Openness and vulnerability arrive through the experience of looking without speaking, and the phrase “We can only hint at this with words” suggests that a feeling, a moment, or an experience is yearning to be named. But the exhibition’s title also points to the inadequacies of language. Our bodies hold memory, story, and trauma, and words often fail to convey the fleshy, corporeal narrative that defines a life. That is to say, words can only hint at what lies beneath the surface. Through multisurfaced experiential painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, and Andrea Taylor aim to fill in the blanks where words cannot describe the myriad personal, historical, and cultural encounters and occurrences that make up the human experience.

All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with. 

These extraverbal communications reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion. 

Sponsored by Parc Retirement Living and North Vancouver Recreation & Cultural Commission.

Curatorial text by Kate Henderson
Essays by Yani Kong and Jayne Wilkinson
Exhibition Publication designed by Margery Theroux

Images: Rachel Topham Photography