Eli Howey | Passageways

Eli Howey: Passageways
February 28 – April 4, 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, February 28, 6pm – 9pm

Including sculpture, printmaking, book arts, and community engagement, Passageways is a solo exhibition by Eli Howey based on a series of watercolour and gouache paintings of the same title. In the series, characters in shadowy environments interact with surrounding objects and flora. The artist illuminates the body as the ultimate symbol of transgression — first physically, as the vehicle, exemplified by the exact moment of being held in the tension of transgressing two spaces, and further, as the energetic mediator, a passageway between tangible and non-tangible spaces that can manifest ideas, movements, thoughts, memories, and other vibrations into physical reality. The artwork reinterprets the body through an expansive symbolism, building towards an imaginative-poetic-visual language around human psychology, identity, and gender.

Artist Biography
Eli Howey is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in comics and printmaking. Howey’s artwork incorporates the imagined spaces within environments to tell stories that explore the body’s relationship to the unseen world. Reinterpreting the body within an imaginative symbolism allows Howey to explore sensitive topics around gender, identity, and mental health in a more nuanced and understandable way. The artist illustrates the internal world of thoughts, feelings and intuition, which converge on the visual plane. Nature is an important element in Howey’s artwork, providing pathways for creative imagining outside of the confines of capitalist colonial culture.

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Gallery Gachet is located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on the unceded and occupied territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Gallery Gachet has a mandate to support artists and offer art programs addressing mental health and socio-political marginalization, while promoting art as a means for survival, cultural participation, and human rights.

Eli Howey: Passageways was made possible with the support of WePress Community Arts Space, the Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Foundation, the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, and the Lacey Prize 2019.