Karen Kraven is a Montreal-based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory that stopped manufacturing the year she was born and by the physical and optical properties of textiles, her practice explores the ways clothing registers the body.
Through her research, Kraven questions what it means to interrupt production, and how to start working again, for the better. The work in LULL evokes both the presence and absence of the body, and points to the instability of the body itself: interrogated, exhausted and disappearing. What does it mean to stop producing? What are the political and societal implications of doing so?
Kraven’s LULL has arrived at a strange time. The need for social distancing has already vastly changed the current social order, and it will inevitably change the way that this work is seen. Latitude 53 will be closed to the public when this exhibition opens; much of the experience will be relegated through online and written means. Kraven shares more with CKUA’s Tony King:
Karen Kraven’s exhibition LULL opened April 4th at Latitude 53 Gallery in Edmonton as part of a virtual show that continues until May 9th.