STRIKE A CHORD
Curated by Tamara Toledo

Exhibition: April 13 to June 3, 2017
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 4, 2017, 7-10PM
Remarks and Artist Talk: 8PM
Performance by Claudia Bernal: 8:30PM

To ‘strike a chord’ is to create or trigger an emotional negative or positive response to an action. In this exhibition, artists respond to times of peril and violence: they retaliate with protest, search for healing, all while conjuring an atmosphere of resistance. At times when our role as citizens seem to ever more bluntly demonstrate that actions need to be taken in order for there to be change, Montreal-based artist Claudia Bernal, Toronto-based artists —Coco Guzmán, Julieta María and David Constantino Salazar— use performance, video, installation, sculpture and drawing to position themselves as activists in a society that has revealed its ultra-right wing ideology.

Artists in Strike a Chord present multiple perspectives and offer various tools to activate social integrity, social justice, and respect. While both Bernal and Guzmán tackle performance and drawing as change catalysts and see the power of individuals capable of redefining the course of history through memory and action, Salazar reveals the vulnerability we all share and the obstacles that expose our precarious lives. María offers a comforting and nurturing encounter with our mothers, revealing our instinctive nature to survive despite sentiments of fear and isolation lingering in the world today. During times of uncertainty and anxiety, it is artists who create meaning and a sense of purpose when all else seems to be crumbling. Artists raise their voices; they elicit and provoke those who do not want to change and strike something within all of us.

This exhibition is co-presented by Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts