Karen Kraven
Fray
From September 14 to October 19, 2024
Galerie Nicolas Robert Toronto is pleased to present Fray, an exhibition of new and recent work by Karen Kraven. Expanding her ongoing series of textile-based sculptural propositions, she offers fabric, garment patterns and related materials as generative, mesmerizing new forms. Simultaneously highlighting labour, gender, and class histories in relation – Kraven’s work critically and optimistically points to both the personal and the political in what we wear.
Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory, which stopped manufacturing the year that she was born, and her mother’s pursuit in fashion design, her recent works point to an indefinite body and both resistance and vulnerability in their unwearability and bodilessness. Her practice explores the ways in which clothing registers the body — how the body is unfinished, unstable and like an archive, something that unfolds and changes with time — pointing to the sustained impact of work and wear.
The works in Fray, many hanging on an industrial language of powder coated brackets, feature soft forms that confound in their arrangements. One can imagine a laborer that has suddenly walked away from a textile factory workstation, leaving a project left uncompleted by commercial standards – the pattern and material then reforming itself with new details and structures with exhilarating new logic. By recombining and scaling up existing patterns, (the disparate garment elements, often too large for the human body), and using the remains of other patterns, the work emphasizes the often-unrecognized reasoning and working processes in garment making.
Kraven’s solo exhibitions include Oakville Galleries (2025); Axenéo7, Gatineau; Platform Centre, Winnipeg (2022); Latitude 53, Edmonton (2020); Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2019) and Toronto Sculpture Garden (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland; Mercer Union, Toronto (2015). She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal (2020); NADA House, New York (2019), Darling Foundry, Montréal, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2016).
Her work is in the collections of the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Group, National Bank, Deloitte, Equitable Bank, Claridge Collection, Collection Majudia, Global Affairs Canada and numerous private collections. Kraven holds an MFA from Concordia University (2012) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2006). She is currently an Assistant Professor in Visual Studies with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.