cold feet talk like hands explores grief through poetry and photography.
Have you been wondering about the glass displays on the ground floor of the Hall building? They’re part of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery’s satellite exhibition program. This program brings the work of artists and curators into an alternative space, SIGHTINGS 41, a white cube made of glass located on the ground floor of the Hall building. One of their three annual projects within the satellite exhibition program, cold feet talk like hands, just came to an end.
The artist at the origin of cold feet talk like hands is B. Brookbank, a multidisciplinary artist from Nova Scotia. They explored the themes of desire, grief, and longing through photography, poetry, and sculpture. The artwork featured in the exhibit was a mixed-media installation made of an antique door, which they used as a photographic frame. Pictures were arranged on the frame along with various doorknobs the artist collected.
“It’s a practice that is difficult to summarize in a few lines or in a few words,” said Julia Eilers Smith, curator of the exhibition. “It resists a simple explanation.”
Brookbank’s work is profoundly linked to the passing of their mother.
“My mother was always a central figure in my practice, from when I started shooting as a teenager until my master’s thesis,” they said.
This loss caused them to build on other themes they were already exploring, creating an exhibit where they worked with mundane objects and scenes of life, digging into the stories they carry and the feelings they convey. Brookbank’s work has a sense of nostalgia and melancholy.
“Once, a professor mentioned to me that my work felt like it was a memorial,” said Brookbank. “At the time, it was unintentional. But soon after, I began to examine notions of grief through the loss of someone close to me.”
An artist talk took place on Oct. 22 in the Hall building, where the artist presented their work and explained their creative process, going through all of the photographs that made up the project. They read their poetry out loud, explaining where their inspiration came from.
The talk took place at 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday; there was a lot of activity in the Hall building. It was an unconventional setting for this sort of event. Still, there was something poetic about sitting in front of the artwork, listening to the artist’s soft voice, and taking the time to stop and hear about someone’s creative journey in such a hectic environment.
“It’s a project about perception,” said Eilers Smith. “It’s about the way we look at things. The artist shows through their work how they look at normal things informed by this grief that they’re living.”
cold feet talk like hands was part of a larger project, See Fever, which is the theme that was adopted this year for the SIGHTINGS 41 exhibitions.
“The expression refers to a fervent desire to ‘see everything,’ the lure of strategies that aim to see ‘more’ or ‘further,’ and to contexts that widen our field of vision or destabilize our perceptual mechanisms,” reads the companion text.
