MIRANDA CRABTREE

O L D O R C H A R D

A painting installation by Toronto-based artist, Miranda Crabtree at This Month Only Artspace January 2019.

This Month Only Artspace is produced by Laura Hudspith, Morris Fox, and Nick Silvani

Old Orchard is a grove of silken air-brushed panels and their sculptural counterparts. Women are laid into the grain of the landscape; participating in activities of collecting, archiving, protecting, playing, or the keeping of their ambiguously vegetal props. Crabtree imagines the aged and seemingly barren orchard as an idyllic past-space for fantasy and desire to flourish. The exhibition is an invitation to wander through a once verdant woodland and witness its transformation into a site for the activities and labours women. Playful figures frozen in their act, embody a physical autonomy and momentary pleasure that melts into the tangled spiritual domain of the pastoral.

Deriving subject matter from dreams and daily interaction with natural spaces, Miranda Crabtree creates interdisciplinary imagery as panacea to these sorted impressions. Her work echoes a two-fold and deeply felt concern for her surroundings that connects current ecological dissonance with the restricted ability of women to move safely through urban wooded spaces.

The artist would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

This Month Only is located on the ground floor of the old Coffin Factory at 91 Niagara Street, Toronto. Like so many other culturally rich buildings in Toronto, the Coffin Factory is slated for condo development at the end of March, 2019. The aim of this intimate space is to show new and exciting work from emerging artists and offer an alternative to the commercial and rental gallery scene until demolition.

Text by Miranda Crabtree and Laura Hudspith.

All photographic documentation by Tamara Leger.