217
Opening Reception
Saturday January 18, 2020 - 2pm to 4pm
Artist Talk
Sunday January 19, 2020 - 1pm to 3pm
Sasha Opeiko
On view until October 4th, 2020
The exhibition 217 includes a series of graphite drawings and 3D printed objects based on images sourced from an article outlining the initial investigations of section 217 in the 4th block of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which contains a large, highly radioactive mass of melted matter, formed following the nuclear meltdown in 1986 and referred to as the Elephant’s Foot.
With this project, the Elephant’s Foot is interpreted as an object that is necessarily distant and invisible, deriving information from the limits of what is visually accessible in these degraded and artefacted digital black and white images.
Sasha Opeiko (b. 1986 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Windsor, ON. Her practice varies between painting, drawing, media, sculpture and design. Sasha received a BFA from the University of Windsor (2009) and an MFA from University of Victoria (2012). Her work has been exhibited at Artcite Inc. (Windsor), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham), Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria), and Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH). In addition to her individual art practice, she works collaboratively with her partner Martin Stevens on an ongoing, object-based basis. Their installation Third Line was exhibited at the 2014 International Zizek Studies Conference: Parallax Future(s) in Art and Design, Ideology and Philosophy.
She is a recipient of several grants, such as the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant to Visual Artists (2015), the Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists: Emerging Grant (2016), the City of Windsor’s Arts Culture and Heritage Fund (2017), and OAC’s Visual Artists Creation Projects Grant (2019). In 2016, Sasha participated in the AIR Studio Paducah Residency (Paducah KY) and the BAiR Late Winter Intensive program at the Banff Centre (Banff AB) to develop her project 217 (Elephant’s Foot). Her most recent body of work, when people came out of the forest there was nothing, was shown as a solo exhibition at SB Contemporary Art (Windsor).
Artist Talk: Sasha Opeiko: 217
Photo and Video documentation courtesy of Matthew Hayes.