Margie Kelk, detail from NOWHERENESS, 2014.
“Margie Kelk’s current work is concerned with issues of pain, rootlessness, and alienation, in relation to online and offline social networking sites. Her ceramic heads – their faces distorted, filled with despair and sometimes hope – are placed among models of disassembled computer components; they become components themselves, victimized or in control. The dialog that emerges veers between ‘real,’ physical, and virtual ontologies; the pieces becomes sites of meditation. On one hand, for example, the elderly are swept aside in society’s continuing abandonment of individuals deemed useless; on the other, the elderly may be empowered by social networking. We’re living in a time of high-speed cultural change; Kelk’s work asks us to slow down and see what damage we may have caused, what promises may yet be fulfilled.” (Alan Sondheim)
Margie Kelk has been exhibiting her artwork in Canada since 2000. She was on the Board of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto, Ontario) for eight years, and was Chair for six of them. Since 2009 she has been an active member of The Red Head Gallery (Toronto), and she is now gallery Chair. Her China-based books and drawings were represented by the Headbones Gallery in 2006-7, and she was a member of Gallery 1313 in Toronto, from 2003 until 2007. She has been showing in Canada, the United States and Europe. She has received prizes for several of her works, and has been awarded grants by the Ontario Arts Council. Margie is a graduate of Wellesley College, The Johns Hopkins University (PhD.), and the Toronto School of Art degree program.
Images: Artcite Inc. reception, 2014.