Wei Li: Skinbound

Esker Foundation (Project Space)
February 12 - June 9

Wei Li’s recent series of digital works, "Skinbound," offers an unsettling exploration of a world where the human body and everyday objects coalesce in evocative, visceral, and emotionally provocative hybrids. To compose these images, Li utilizes hyper realistic computer renderings to transform consumer goods into anthropomorphic fusions by seamlessly integrating the textures of human skin, hair, and blemishes with the shapes, labels, and branding of product packaging.

Li draws from her personal experiences as an artist within the Chinese diaspora as a foundational element of these works. By transposing human elements onto objects with visual language typically recognizable to North American and East Asian households, she juxtaposes the familiar and the uncanny as a personal reflection on contending with a fluid sense of identity, femininity, and motherhood. Li’s strange forms also appeal to broader experiences of the complexities, tensions, pressures, and emotional nuances inherent in the daily reality of being part of a diasporic community within a contemporary, multicultural society.

These surrealist objects also offer a challenge to our relationship with the familiar material world and the cultural narratives and expectations embedded within it. Situated in the Project Space, "Skinbound" disturbs the street’s commercial setting through its incongruously grotesque and imperfect images; skin textures are bumpy and flawed with highly visible hair and pores. These objects, humorous in their subversion of conventional aesthetics, evoke a sense of the abject and challenge the familiar airbrushed perfection pervasive in advertising imagery.

Open: 24/7
Access: Location is wheelchair accessible. Exhibition is child friendly.
For more information see eskerfoundation.com

Esker Foundation, 4th floor, 1011 9th Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0H7