Some memories fade; “Sweet Dreams” refuses to.
Running from Jan. 17 to March 21, Kingston-based artist Tonya Corkey’s exhibition “Sweet Dreams” fills Modern Fuel’s main gallery with sculptural, textile, and projection-based works examining the complex relationship between memory, thought, and vulnerability.
Upon entry, the exhibition feels immediately and bleakly intimate. Although the main gallery is large, it’s sparsely occupied. A double bed sits alone at the centre of the room. From there, attention is drawn outward to the walls, where sculptures and tapestries hang around the perimeter of the space. The walls are painted a dark bluish grey called eigengrau, a colour often described as the shade seen when people close their eyes.
Composed of several individual works, the exhibition’s focal point is the eponymous “Sweet Dreams,” a large installation featuring a double bed covered with a quilt and a video projected onto the headboard. The video depicts a stop-motion animation of bats chasing and eating moths across the surface of the quilt, an image Corkey uses to represent the way certain thoughts swirl through the mind at night.
“Your bedroom is meant to be a place of comfort,” Corkey said in an interview with The Journal. “But you can also have feelings of vulnerability and betrayal there from memory.”
For Corkey, bats and moths carry symbolic weight and recur throughout the exhibition. She described moths as “soft, delicate, docile” and bats as “predatory, stealthy, quiet, but quick.” Both widely recognized as nocturnal creatures, they create a visual metaphor, with moths representing nostalgic memories while bats signify intrusive nighttime thoughts.
A distinctive element of “Sweet Dreams” is its central material: lint. Over more than a decade, Corkey has collected lint from her own laundry, from friends and family, and from people who contacted her after encountering her work. The material is used to construct sculptures and tapestries suspended throughout the gallery.
“Lint actually carries people in it. It carries our daily lives. It carries a metaphor itself for memories and time passing and collecting,” Corkey said.
Corkey first began working with lint while experimenting with media during her undergraduate studies. She found it allowed her to do things she couldn’t achieve with wool, paint, or charcoal, opening unexpected expressive possibilities.
In “Sweet Dreams,” lint appears both in raw felted form depicting brightly coloured moths sewn onto hanging tapestries and in sculptural works, where it has been cast over clay busts into the likenesses of bats mounted throughout the space.
Rather than offering a single narrative, the exhibition invites multiple readings. Corkey said her work has shifted over time from a focus on nostalgia and the desire to preserve certain memories toward engaging with forgetting and what it means to let go of memories.
“What happens when we no longer wish to access certain memories?” Corkey said. “Because not all of the memories that we hold we want to hang on to.”
Though Corkey asks her audience to consider which memories are and aren’t worth holding onto, experiencing “Sweet Dreams” is one memory I won’t soon forget.
Tags
Art, exhibition, Gallery, Modern Fuel gallery, Sweet Dreams, Tonya Corkey, Visual art
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