Whether it’s a song, novel, or screenplay, nothing brings out its creator’s thoughts and emotions like the craft of writing. And this month at Deluge Contemporary Art, Jo Ying Peng has curated an exhibit dedicated to deconstructing the act of writing as a way to shape identity. Why This Word runs until Saturday, August 21 and is partially a product of Peng having time to research because of the pandemic.
“I don’t know how to describe the influence of COVID,” begins Peng, who also runs Vernacular Institute, located in Mexico City. “I feel that my life just got paused… I think the main thing is I did was a lot of research last year.”
One of the pieces in the exhibit is “Correction Arts Exhibition Hall” from artist Hou I-Ting, who is interested in labour conditions for females; for the piece, I-Ting worked with a prison who also provide product-processing labour from female inmates.
“This fabric piece has a speech [on it], and the artist collaborated with a prison in Taiwan, a female prison, and because of the local government promoting a strategy, this encouraged the local prison to be able to initiate their own business model,” says Peng. “I just read about that and she approached to do this collaboration with the female prison, and that was the whole idea.”
For Peng, art is a way to communicate messages and raise awareness about important issues—the book The Femicide Machine by Sergio González Rodríguez has been a big influence on her. Peng says Why This Word is about “getting to know—more trying to picture—the female labourer and female identity in our society from very individual experiences and from these three artists.”
“The female labourer and the female artist’s identity in a contemporary society is always my long-term concern,” says Peng, “and I am taking this into this exhibition.”
Why This Word
Until Saturday, August 21
Deluge Contemporary Art
deluge.ca