When I interviewed her in her studio overlooking Winnipeg’s historic Exchange District, artist Chantel Mierau was hard at work putting together materials for her first-ever solo exhibit. The video installation was opening in two weeks (it opened on March 1), and Mierau still had some minor video editing to do. She was also sewing sheets to project her videos onto.
“It’s scary and good,” Mierau said when asked how she feels about the upcoming exhibit. “It’s exciting.”
Titled <i>Homemaking</i>, the exhibition is in some ways the culmination of the last seven years of Mierau’s art practice. After attending Canadian Mennonite University for two years, Mierau transferred to the University of Manitoba, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 2011.
The 27-year-old said that while her thesis was officially in drawing, it functioned as a multimedia program where she could explore a variety of different artistic disciplines, including knitting, which she learned when she was 18 years old. Learning to knit has influenced not only the form of her work, but also the subject matter, Mireau said, noting that she has always been interested in domesticity and Mennonite tradition.
“There’s something about knitting that’s really fascinating,” Mierau said. “It reminds people of grandmothers, comfort and home; that’s all packed into it. So as soon as you use knitting, it has those associations [with domesticity and tradition].”
Consisting of six videos, <i>Homemaking</i> weaves together imagery from weekly chores and insect lifecycles. Mierau said these sources provide a way of exploring tradition and other ingrained habits, particularly “their ability to both provide great comfort and create great discomfort.”
The work explores the theme on two levels, Mierau explained. It explores broader traditions as well as small things like the chores people repeat every day. “You do your dishes, and the next day there are more dishes to do,” Mierau said. “All humans are stuck in that repetition of a chore; we’re stuck in our bodies. The exhibit is about all those things.”
A statement accompanying the exhibit reads, “The artist asks earnestly whether the homes and cultures we spin for ourselves are indeed homes, or if they might possibly be inescapable traps.”
The parallel with insect lifestyles came about as Mierau worked with thread. She made webs of material, much the same way spiders, silk worms and moths spin webs. Plus, insects are industrious, and the theme of the exhibit has to do with doing chores.
In one video, entitled “Larva,” a human hunched over in a restrictive pink knitted larva costume walks back and forth, attempting to hang laundry on a wooden structure on a warm prairie summer day.
In “Hatching,” a hand struggles to break free of the cocoon of white thread that surrounds it.
And in a third video, entitled “There Were Socks,” the camera pans over piles of light and dark socks as the narrator recites a reading that turns the Genesis 1 creation story into a meditation on doing the laundry.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now, the earth was formless and void, except for a pile of dirty socks,” Mierau recites. “And God said, ‘Let us separate the socks into lights and darks. Let the light socks be called Day, and the dark socks be called Night.’ And it was so.”
“Mennonites are really good at seeing the holy in the everyday and I wanted to do something that was kind of about that,” said Mierau, who grew up in Langham, Sask., where she attended Zoar Mennonite Church. “It elevates doing laundry to creation story status.”
The artist said her work is not explicitly Mennonite, but a lot of it does speak to being Mennonite. “I want to make something that is relevant to me and tells people about myself and the questions I have about the world: ‘What should we do while we’re here?’ ‘How should we spend out time?’ ‘What sort of lifestyles should we lead?’ ”
So what impact would Mierau like <i>Homemaking</i> to have on its audience? “I hope they feel it has something to do with them,” she said. “That’s all I can ask for, really.”
<i>Homemaking</i> is on display at Winnipeg’s aceartinc. gallery until April 5. For more information, visit chantelmierau.com.
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