Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair : Mandy Espezel

Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair is a collective of sixteen artists who have come together to interpret and play with the spectacle of a national science fair through visual language. By drawing on-site during the Canada-Wide Science Fair, the artists will create and immediately broadcast drawings of selected projects on display. The idea is to expand the notion of drawing around science themes to include the potentials of visual priority, cross-disciplinary work, collaborative drawing, multi-perspectival drawing, non-precious drawing, interactions with people, live tweeting, 5-second-delay blogging, and other unexpected possibilities. Here’s an introduction to Mandy Espezel, Canada-Wide Science Fair Artist.

©Mandy Espezel

Concerned with the distinction between emotional and intellectual knowledge, my practice is an investigation into forms of embodiment. I utilize an instinctual process of image and object making as a system of  confronting concept/form and mind/body divisions.

Interdisciplinary in nature, my practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and animation. The imagery within my work deals with themes of empathy, communication, gender representation, identity formation, and transformation.

Materiality, the body, is simultaneously a specific and universal phenomenon; the place of individual, social, and cultural formation. I explore how phenomenological forms of knowledge and sensation within material exchange communicate the subjective body-as-a-source-of-knowledge, and realize/utilize/expose the objective correlative.

©Mandy Espezel

Mandy Espezel is an artist from the northern community of Fort McMurray Alberta. Espezel received a BFA from the University of Alberta in 2007, and a MFA from the University of Lethbridge in 2012. They currently live and work in Lethbridge, Alberta.