Coming Forth By Day – Deborah Thompson

March 2010, Stages of death, separation, and renewal are core themes uniting Deb Thompson’s three bodies of work opening at Gallery Gachet on March 5th. The opening reception includes a performance by Bree Switzer at 8pm.

Coming Forth By Day, a title taken from her research into Egyptian mythology and specifically the Egyptian Book of the Dead which captured her curatorial attention in a project called, SALT: the distillation of matter, which included the work of two Vancouver artists, Haruko Okano and Nicole Dextras. The installation consists of four stations which are intended to be seen as various stages of transformation as we journey through the underworld. The construction of a dress form – a metaphor for the body – is central to the installation. Thompson’s overt laborious and repetitive process of the stitching of hand sized pieces of bees waxed encased rice paper into life sized garments in what she refers to as, re-membering the body both somatically and psychologically echoes the journey of Isis in the throws of her longing for the dismembered body of Osiris. This longing Thompson says, is something all humans share and desire speaks to this need for uniting what has been separated.

Supplementing the dresses is her altar piece sculpture, Memorables. This piece is veiled and upon opening reveals the horizontal body of a dead woman covered in burrs. Thompson created this piece as part of a community art project through the Oxygen Art Centre which paired artists with social agencies. Thompson worked with ANKORS the region AIDS service agency to create an altar commentating the difficult pain of loss and grief as a result of the death of a loved one from AIDS. Her choice of burrs to cover that body act as a metaphor for the AIDS virus and for the stigmas associated with the virus.

The third and final part of her Gachet exhibit consists of paintings selected from her series, The Maternal Body: The Paradox of Desire, which first began when Thompson found a dead mother squirrel on the road one day while out walking. She picked her up to move her off the road and felt such an urgency towards her that she took her home to paint her. This work holds personal meaning for her about her relationship to the maternal as well as bringing awareness to our culture’s relationship to the feminine and specifically the maternal aspect of the feminine. Our cultural rejection of the feminine in its deepest form is the tension and pathos of this work. The paradox of this rejection is the desire for the maternal matrix which supports and brings forth life.

Thompson grew up in Toronto where she split her time between the city and the northern woods. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1984 and since then has lived in various locations throughout the west including Missoula, Montana where she did her M.F.A. in painting. She now makes her home in Nelson, B.C where she has her studio, works as a curator and is raising her daughter. Her paintings have shown in solo shows around the interior, but this is the first time her sculptural installation work will be shown in Vancouver.

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157625165710568