JENNIFER LINDSAY
jennifer lindsay (canada/the republic of ireland) is a tkaronto based artist-researcher working in theatre, video, ceramics, and sound. spanning art and neuro health sciences, her practice is informed by memoirs of the body, language disfluency, and crip time.
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DRAWING A BLANK
photos by prashant gopal
OPEN STUDIO
jan 9 - mar 8, 2025
rochelle and i have known each other for ten years. it is difficult to put the reverence we have for each other's art practice and activism into words. what started out as a working relationship, developed into friendship, included her mentorship, and led to the collaboration of DRAWING A BLANK.
in fall 2024 i gave rochelle a recorder and a few prompts. she took the recorder to her studio at bela farm in hillsburgh ontario and recorded her answers in one go. she answered:
what do you say when you’re stuck in between words?
how do you assess risk in conversations? does it change depending on who you working and socializing with?
what does voicelessness mean to you?
when i listened to her answers i was first struck by the wind travelling across the field in and around her voice. it felt meditative. from this place, i formulated a soundscape with her recordings, and other text-based recordings collected during 26 OR LESS and REMEMBER TO FORGET.
DRAWING A BLANK, an installation by rochelle rubinstein and me, addresses voicelessness in the forms of delayed language recall, family matters, resistance to aggression and violence, and the current moment of extreme censorship and self-censorship.
in this exhibition, visitors enter a spiral-shaped labyrinth of hanging accordion-folded books. suspended from the ceiling to overturn the normal association of reading in a linear manner, the 10-foot-long books are visually and thematically connected, primarily by block-printed images. viewers can follow patterns and narratives in a variety of directions. a sense of disorientation is encouraged.
these mixed-media books include rochelle’s woodblock prints, ink drawings, paintings, collages, embroidery, and hand-written text. Intertwined with images of nature, disasters, and human frailty, are themes of displacement, repression, ritual and desire.
throughout the labyrinth, a soundscape by me can be heard playing on a loop. it includes speakers sharing turns of phrase, trains of thought, and long-form stories relating to voicelessness. at the centre of the spiral, visitors are invited to sit with both the visual and aural and become attuned to the paradoxes of drawing a blank.
photos by prashant gopal