Joanna Malinowska
A Hawk from a Handsaw, Sep 14 – Oct 20, 2013

CANADA is pleased to present A Hawk from a Handsaw, Joanna Malinowska’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The center piece of this exhibition is a large pile of dirt brought by the artist from the Yukon Territory. The dirt pile becomes the location for a performance during which Malinowska will pan the entire pile using old-fashioned panning methods in search of gold potentially found in soil from the region historically associated with the Gold Rush.

This piece is surrounded by a number of sculptural works: a giant bear similar to roadside attraction monuments the artist encountered during her drive from the Yukon; a video of a Russian composer reading Allen Ginzburg’s, “America” in a heavy accent, replicas of ceremonial feather capes, a bust of Meret Oppenheim wearing a Haitian mud cake headpiece, and a reconstruction of Isamu Noguchi’s set design for “Appalachian Spring”, the legendary collaboration between Noguchi, Martha Graham, and Aaron Copland and modernist take on the history of settlement in North America.

The reconstructed pieces function as both sculptures and props for the ‘gold-search’ performance and add the context of an imaginary frontier. This element is consistent with Malinowska’s tendency to draw from classical music and art historic sources as in her earlier works presented in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Joanna Malinowska is a Polish born and New York based artist working in video, sculpture, sound and performance. A graduate of Rutgers University’s BFA program and Yale University’s MFA program, she has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the 2012 Whitney Biennale, the 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and the International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Prague. She has shown her work at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Zamek Ujazdowski Contemporary Art Center in Warsaw, Poland and The Sculpture Center, Smack Mellon, and Art in General in New York

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