not quite ever only — Ioana Dragomir

Ioana Dragomir

not quite ever only

shown at Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario.
curated by Hannah Keating.
photo credits: Toni Hafkenscheid

Adorned with drawings, trinkets, textiles, and text, not quite ever only is an exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Ioana Dragomir. This new work, created by the artist during her residency at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG), is anchored by a homey set situated on a quilt of worn moving blankets, enclosed on three sides by a skeleton of stud walls. Hand-drawn wallpaper, sewn pockets, stickers, and research fragments form delicate layers around and within the exhibition’s central structure. Using materials she found at the gallery, including scrap wood, artist files, and exhibition catalogues, Dragomir’s work is a reflection of the transitory nature of relevance and proximity. Held in temporary and site-specific compositions, each moment in the installation is a poem for viewers to discover, in a pocket in a room inside a room, hidden in plain sight.

Over nearly six decades, the RMG has played host to numerous artists, curators, administrators, and visitors, and its collection houses thousands of artworks and archived materials. The history of any gallery is made up of these things, tangible and intangible, that lend both structure and character to the idea of that place. This is also true in reverse. The people who have made the gallery what it is carry something of this place with them: home libraries hold old catalogues; the institution’s name is listed on artists’ CVs; colleagues who became friends reminisce about when they first met. As if picking up a romance novel, Dragomir chose to be swept up by the presence of these types of stories in the gallery’s archives, drawing especially from the Joan Murray artist files, assembled in large part, and named after, the RMG’s Director Emeritus. Focusing first on artist couples, then more broadly on the theme of friendship, Dragomir savours the way private matters and poetic coincidence inevitably leak into institutional histories and her own work.

Carefully sifted and crafted by the artist, the works in not quite ever only reflect Dragomir’s own imagination and point of view as much as they reveal (or conceal) anything about her source materials, which include additions from her own friends. To borrow from Sarah Ahmed’s writing, this work is an exploration of willful misuse as Dragomir pulls text, images, artworks, and ideas from one context to place them in another. This process is an invitation to consider what is lost, gained, and retained by such an act of creation. As a gesture of collaboration, it is also an opportunity to be attentive to the surprises of temporary proximity and discover delight in the relationships that make us who we are.

- Hannah Keating, curator