It’s All Gone Pear Shaped

It’s All Gone Pear Shaped is a series of intaglio/relief prints and sculptures created directly from the body of an airplane. By deconstructing the remains of an aircraft — a pointedly perfect symbol of post-industrial-revolution modernity, according to Collings in the accompanying essay — Pinheiro reclaims and recycles these discarded objects and alludes to the fragility of the modernist project as a whole. The idea of the airplane as a heterotopia — a space of otherness, neither here nor there — is also contemplated in the work. If when we fly, as Collings writes, boundaries dissolve, time is altered and we are separated from the ordinary laws of nature and body, then Pinheiro’s interaction with the structure of the airplane questions how these relations can be reimagined. The resulting images and structures appear abstract, yet their very making holds traces of real experiences that tell, however cryptically, of its history in the world. The performative action of the making questions the role of images and structures and our relationships to them in forming possible futures. The exhibition was accompanied by a text by Aurelie Collings.

Andrea Pinheiro is an artist and curator working in print, mixed media, paint, video and installation. She has exhibited across Canada and internationally and recently completed an artist book edition commissioned by Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include the Canadian Digital Print exhibition at the Novosibirsk Graphic Art Triennial, (Russia) and Not Photographs, a two-person exhibition with Damien Moppett at Presentation House Gallery Satellite in Vancouver. Her curatorial project Fire/fire was recently exhibited at Centre A and Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver. She has completed a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and a curatorial residency at the Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON.