Artist Talk: Aschely Vaughan Cone + Magali Hébert-Huot

Hamiltonian Gallery & Artists

"A Place in Place of" features large-scale abstract paintings and life-sized sculpture that carry echoes of stories lost to time. Taken together, the vibrant works weave a cryptic yet playful narrative that place the viewer in an interrogative role. Artist Aschely Vaughan Cone’s monumental, gestural paintings employ a plethora of symbols - archways, shields, dotted lines and woven patterns - that shift in meaning and tone as they repeat throughout her compositions. Cone’s willingness to reveal the rawness of her work’s creation through her paint handling is contrasted with a tendency to suspend definitive meaning, thereby creating a viewing experience in which interpretation and material shift from canvas to canvas. Drawing from imagery associated with her French-Canadian heritage, Magali Hébert-Huot’s wax, rubber and stucco casts of axe handles and chopped wood approach the weight of remembering a proud history with a playful hand. Hébert-Huot’s use of unexpected, mass-produced materials and ostentatious colors stand in sharp contrast with the objects, which on their own carry associations with tales of struggle and survival in an unforgiving, brutal wilderness. In this way, Hébert-Huot’s sculptures serve as kitschy contemporary mnemonic devices: reminders of a unique ancestral history whose legacy grows increasingly distant with every passing generation.