measured by hand
August 15 - September 28, 2024
Duo Exhibition featuring Vitória Monteiro and Lan “Florence” Yee
Artspeak Gallery
measured by hand is a duo exhibition featuring the works of artists Vitória Monteiro and Lan “Florence” Yee. Exploring the architectures of memory, the exhibition considers how we hold and build space for personal and cultural histories.
measured by hand employs the concept of a vessel as a nonlinear and intangible tool for gathering, holding, and knowledge sharing. Monteiro conceptualizes notions of rest and cultural narratives, and Yee articulates the reverberations of grief; together, the installation recalls notions of domestic interiors and land anchored by material objects. Wooden support structures, fabric hangings, sculpture, and poetic fragments traverse subjects of cultural burial practices and queer abuse. Tender and tactile, the works reflect on what we do with memory that is difficult, or incomplete.
If memory is a vessel we give form to, what are the architectures we build out of necessity? In giving the exhibition porous walls, measured by hand builds a vessel that holds without containment. As a site of commemoration and possibility, it asks what might grow from sharing in feeling and knowledge.
Documentation by Sophia English
about the artists
Vitória Monteiro
Vitória Monteiro, born in Belém, Brazil 1997, is an artist who explores the intricacies of language abstraction, the reprocessing of information, cultural identity, gender, and queerness. Monteiro uses the mediums of papermaking, sculpture, installation, and performance to navigate the various realms that knowledge inhabits. With a subtle undertone of satire, they strive to locate themselves within these different spaces. Their works embody the themes of dislocation, translation, indexicality, and citation.
Lan “Florence” Yee
Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and serial collaborator based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), and many others. Along with Arezu Salamzadeh, they co-founded the Chinatown Biennial in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U.
