This winter (2014-15), the incredibly talented, thoughtful, and playful Lisa Folkerson spent a month living and working in the Just Call Me Jack space. In early December, she filled the room with a series of drawings and three video works to create "Letters for Lisa." The show, on view until the end of January 2015, is a raw, bemused, and also deeply serious reflection on what it means to be a "girl" growing up in the 90s and now making work as an artist living in small quarters in Toronto. The drawings are colourful, comic-book-like re-workings of sections in young adult magazines that the artist read as a teen. One of the videos shows the artist floating in water. In another, she's lying in bed, the camera suspended above her. Her bed fills the screen in the larger projection (photographed above). It also fills most of the room that is both her home and her studio in life. The long, quiet moments in all three works are both welcoming and uncomfortable, as the viewer wonders at the artist's thoughts and circumstance.
Lisa generously shared her opening with Allison Comrie and Carey Jernigan, JCMJ family just back from a residency at DeLiceiras18 in Porto, Portugal. They installed stripped down versions of two pieces they made while away: 18 Variations (a collaboration) and Wind Section (by Allison Comrie). Thanks to all who came out to support all three artists and their November 2014 experiments.