Alicia Proudfoot: Breath Scaling

The Art Incubator Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday July 26^th, 7 ‑10 pm
Free admission

Breath Scaling is an exhibition of miniature sculptures and experimental mixed media works by Alicia Proudfoot – an Edmonton-based interdisciplinary artist – that charts the artist’s asthmatic body as arduous terrain. The project is the direct result of the Proudfoot’s continued exploration of topographic notation in sculpture and installation that thematically extends the recognition of all bodies as terrain. Experimentation is valuable to Alicia Proudfoot as she explores humour’s role through her somatic archive on illness.

Breath Scaling – Proudfoot’s most recent project – traverses a difficult line between humour and severity that is so nuanced a guide was invited to lead the expedition report. The artist called her The Inventor –a persona Proudfoot embodies for behind the scenes research in her art practice. Rarely does The Inventor indulge with finished work, but she is exuberant by nature and wickedly clever in doling out absurd, almost backhanded solutions for better respiration. She couldn’t resist an exhibition featuring her field notes, trials, and designs compiled while scaling Alicia’s ribs like mountains.

Many of the featured work in the exhibition project include foldable mountain maquettes made from metal light switch covers, mixed media prints of cartographic notation, selected visual diary entries, and the very balloons that The Inventor climbed with to celebrate a successful summit. Installed throughout the exhibition are accessibility handles for those viewers who wish to stretch and bend for optimal viewing of each work and make an extreme sport out of empathy. Upon this somatic survey Alicia Proudfoot hopes to inspire deeper conversations that reassess our perception of heroism, adventure, and the habitual oversimplification to conflate illness with identity.