Vancouver Now! Emily Hermant

Emily Hermant is the inaugural artist in our new Vancouver Now! exhibition series, highlighting artists whose work is both timely and closely tied to this city.

Since arriving in Vancouver in 2016, Hermant has steadily built a reputation as an artist to watch. The exhibition will highlight her weavings, which are laboriously crafted from the wires and data cables of the technologies that envelop us, thoughtfully shifting the speed and focus of our attention. They invite viewers to move from the frenetic virtual experiences that increasingly characterize our daily lives to an unhurried and surprisingly aesthetically satisfying consideration of the material basis of that simulated world.

Although the works are beautiful in reproduction, their full effect can be experienced only in person. As they are approached, each work, which initially appears like an abstract or highly stylized painting or textile, transforms to reveal its materiality as a structure of coloured, insulated wires and data cables.