The Invisible Woman

Exhibition: May 5 to 27, 2023
Vernissage and Artist-guided gallery tour: May 4 at 6 pm
Art Hive with Marcia Pitch (in-person): May 6, 10:30 am to 1 pm

Marcia Pitch’s installation The Invisible Woman is composed of a combination of dismantled household objects and found objects (or what the artist calls “back alley discards”). Pitch works with bits and pieces of different items and images because, as she states, ‘’their fragmented form matches my understanding of contemporary life. Moreover, I deeply appreciate objects and images with a prior history in that they bring a new discourse to the work and have their own story to tell about the world.’’

The ageing woman is another central theme in Pitch’s art practice. Older people, especially women, also have stories to offer about the world but our society tends not to value their experiences, and wraps them in invisibility cloaks.

Included with the sculptures in the exhibition are ten large-scale collages featuring landscapes that allude to the sexualized body. The collages are created by ripping and gluing together images of body parts, colour blocks, textures and patterns from art history books and fashion magazines, and explore the effects of ageism and sexism. The sexually provocative imagery challenges societal norms and demands both power and visibility for all ageing women, including the artist herself.

Marcia Pitch’s artistic practice has spanned over four decades and includes installation, sculpture, assemblage, and collage. After graduating with a BFA from the University of Manitoba, she pursued graduate work at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland California, and a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia. In the early 1970s, she produced a number of installations centered on political issues based on her long-standing involvement with Amnesty International.

While parenting, she began to work with the recycled materials around her, specifically toys and household objects. She combined wildly unrelated and incongruous bits and pieces of disassembled toys, and other flotsam and jetsam to create a new expression. In her recent work, she continues to draw on used everyday materials as she imagines the effects of a drastically accelerated pace of evolution and climate change driven by greed and political turbulence.

The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support of this exhibition project.

www.marciapitch.com