After great pain, a formal feeling comes

Installation views of After great pain, a formal feeling comes presented by the Art Gallery of York University in partnership with York University AMPD

2016, Toronto

Curated by Megan Toye

Artists: Ellen Bleiwas, Kriss Janik, Erin Vincent

Industrial felt sourced from The Felt Store

Exhibition Brochure

Exhibition Website

Press Release

This exhibition won a GOG Award for best First Exhibition in a Public Art Gallery

Exhibition Text

After great pain, a formal feeling comes asks: how do melancholic feelings take form? Is there away to get to melancholia’s affect—the sense experience of pain, loss and grief—by attending to the material specificity of aesthetic form? And in what ways can visual forms and temporal structures act as metaphors for melancholic subjectivity? 

In his 1917 text Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud distinguished between a person who is mourning and a person who is melancholic: when mourning, the individual projects the loss outward and engages in a process of working-through or healing, while the melancholic subject holds onto this loss and incorporates it into the structure of self, making the ego “poor and empty.” The works featured here by Ellen Bleiwas, Erin Vincent and Kriss Janik manifest this internalized emptiness of melancholia by incorporating a sense of loss or element of incompleteness within their formal structure, provoking engagement with what Freud termed the “particular and peculiar ache” of melancholic loss, pain and grief.

Featuring an immersive industrial felt installation by Ellen Bleiwas, mixed-media sculptures by Erin Vincent, and a sound piece by Kriss Janik, After great pain, a formal feeling comes asks how material elements can communicate affectively. That is, the works here not only rely on the materiality of their form for their composition, but they actively embrace and showcase this materiality as central to the meaning and constitution of the work. Materiality is what contains the works’ affective texture; the material is the irreducible specificity of the form, the peculiar and particular ache, of the melancholic subject. 

Curated by Megan Toye

This is a Curatorial Intensive exhibition sponsored by the Art Gallery of York University in collaboration with York University’s Art History Department in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design. Special thanks to Philip Monk, Michael Maranda and Jennifer Fisher.