With Love

With Love
Kirsten Drewes
Elizabeth Rankin

“With Love” embraces the possibilities of love. How do artists visually respond to the people, places, and things they hold dear?
Whether romantic or platonic, chosen or biological, physical or emotional, love and the bonds we share with others permeate our lives. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love: New Visions, “Communities sustain life – not nuclear families, or ‘the couple,’ and certainly not the rugged individualist. Hooks describes love as an art, one that is grounded in the people we surround ourselves with and that serves as the linchpin for society.
Performed, painted, carved, and quilted, love is visually expressed in every medium and is the subject of artworks and objects across time and geography. Medieval tapestries allegorize love as a game to be won or a castle to be conquered. The coy smiles of Fragonard’s Rococo subjects suggest that love is a seductive chase. Depicting everyday acts of kissing, snuggling, and bathing artists depict the intimate bond shared between mothers and children. Allan Rohan Crite’s paintings are visual love letters to the ties that bind Black neighbour hoods and communities in mid-20th century America. Félix González-Torres’ candy sculptures and the AIDS Memorial Quilt commemorate the joy and pain experienced by the queer community during the 1980s AIDS crisis.
The exhibition presents the care of love as a transgressive and liberatory force and evidences the practices of female agency enacted through care and love. Transgressive because devotion and grief are at odds with the pace of life, so unusual as to cause polite concern that such feeling is too much, perhaps even self -destructive. Liberating because the acceptance of the needs of the interior self to practice emotional and spiritual attachment to others is uplifting and self healing.
From this understanding Elizabeth Rankin and Kirsten Drewes create an installation containing paintings, drawings and sculptural works of family love and care.: the love of a daughter for a father, the love of a sister for a sister.
Elizabeth makes work that traces her sister’s life from childhood to age with a loving care for the relationships between sisters over time. No one is closer. A sister is the almost self, the different self. In this case an endangered, the more fragile self.
To this tableau of family love, Kirsten contributes a commemoration of her late father, whom she lost to dementia long before his actual death. The artworks aim to describe the cruel reality between the sadness about the loss of her father to another world and the dear affection for the person that he once was and that underneath is still there.
With their installation, Elizabeth and Kirsten embrace the viewer into their personal worlds.