florescence

Blooming over her body, a bouquet of indiscriminate desires.

The grotesque body has no beginning or end; it takes up too much space and is ineffaceable from its environment. In Joy Wong’s exhibition florescence, cut-outs from etchings and lithographs are pasted over each other on the gallery walls in an expansive collage that cannot be fully contained. In this way, the gallery becomes an activated, contaminated body, and the walls become the surface, the skin. Puckers and folds follow the marks of each print as the sporadic clusters float on the walls. Transparent monoprints hang precariously from antimicrobial copper armatures, teetering between action and safety, preservation and destruction. Gelatinous and reminiscent of mucus, these hanging works thrust the two-dimensionality of print into the physical environment. In thinking through ideas of the matrix and materiality, one must contend with the blossoming of anxieties, fluctuations, and repetitions.

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Joy Wong (they/she) is an artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their practice has ranged from contemplation of surfaces, diasporic and queer longing, and material investigations of the shifting physicality of the precarious body. Wong received their MFA from Western University and was a finalist for the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. They were the 2019 Pope Artist in Residence at NSCAD and have held residencies at St. Michael’s Print Shop in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario. They have received grants from the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Wong currently teaches at the University of Toronto.