Grimsby Public Art Gallery, 2017
Glenhyrst Art Gallery, 2019
In this exhibition, Toronto-based artist Jeff Bierk photographs friends and family to examine how past events and experiences create meaning. It pairs a series of photographs taken in hospitals between 2009 and 2010 with current photo-based projects. The result is a layering of memory that is at once beautiful and distorted. Bierk first encountered hospital curtains when his parents were hospitalized; soon after, his then-partner was admitted to hospital for a serious illness. For Bierk, he began shooting hospital curtains as a means of coping with the trauma he long-associated with these spaces. By returning to these photographs and objects as only the living can, by seeing them as documents and lived experience, Bierk finds new possibilities for emotional exchange with the departed. “These seemingly lifeless, inanimate folds of fabric say much more to me,” he writes, “they embody the personal loss I have experienced and my incessant desire to search for the beauty in the realities of life.”
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