Exhibition · Abbozzo Gallery · Toronto
Abbozzo Gallery is pleased to share our return to Art Toronto this year. Bringing together Emily Pope’s paintings and Adrienna Matzeg’s embroidered works, this presentation explores materiality through different mediums. Across their practices, the transformation of paint and thread becomes central to how familiar surfaces and remembered places are represented. Matzeg's punch-needle embroidery practice is driven by the narrative quality of two mediums, her photography referenced in textile, with a focus on memory and nostalgia. Through reducing the subject matter in her work to simplified colours, shapes and fragments she explores how we recall memories, with a specific interest in travel destinations and souvenirs. This presentation recounts her transits at night through the neon-lit urban centres, drawn to the glow of night markets, karaoke bars, and convenience stores. The experience of constant renewal brought about by travel in an unfamiliar space afforded Matzeg moments of contemplation, wonder, and pause. Pope reiterates the idea of the souvenir from a more existential perspective. Her practice focuses on aspects of femininity, memory, existence, and the body. Her subjects, typically self-portraits or self-referencing, often hold tokens, satin ribbons, or are wearing gloves, and grasp glass objects in various forms playing as a recurring motif throughout her oeuvre. Pope examines the instinctual urge to ward off the inevitable despite our guaranteed decay. Through symbolic imagery, including various of examples of a memento mori, she highlights the quiet absurdity and fragility of resisting mortality-a condition deeply woven into contemporary culture.