Two Legacies brings together recent works on paper by regional artists Tanya Cunnington and Jill Price. While their artworks differ in many fundamental ways, both are engaged in an exploration of what Emily Dickinson describes as the two legacies of love: the joy of attachment and the pain of separation.
Jill Price’s project, Lineage, is a material exploration of artifacts inherited by the artist from her grandmother. Using hand-knitted blankets as drawing devices, this Barrie artist methodically traces each stitch in a meditative process akin to the creation of the original covers. The works are abstract, fragile and reflective of the incomplete and ephemeral nature of memory itself. By contrast, Rama artist Tanya Cunnington’s series Cal.endar responds to her experience of becoming a mother and returning to the Orillia area. Working in her late father-in-law’s studio, the work reflects what we inherit, what we leave behind and how we create in the interstices between.
Jill Price achieved a BFA at the University of Western Ontario and a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design from OCADU. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a 2016 SSHRC research grant and a 2017 Michael Smith Foreign Study Bursary. Price has shown her work throughout Canada, and previously worked as a Curator at Quest Art Gallery in Midland and as a professional arts educator teaching at Georgian College, OCADU and Queens University. She is currently a PhD candidate at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.
Tanya Cunnington has an Associates Degree from OCAD in 2001, where she was the recipient of the Eric Freifeld Award for Excellence in Figurative Art. She has exhibited her work throughout Canada, working independently or as one half of the Birdbath Collaboration with her partner, Bewabon Shilling. She is the recipient of the 2015 John Hartman Award through the MacLaren Art Centre and the Cleeve Horne Purchase Award from the Orillia Museum of Art and History in 2018. She is currently based in the Orillia area, where she is Owner/Director of Lee Contemporary Art.
Jill Price and Tanya Cunnington would like to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council for Exhibition Assistance.
