I am interested in the acts of close reading and translation, interpreting both as creative and transformative. Every text and every work has a hole into which a reader/viewer may insert themselves. If writing is an act of reduction, reading and viewing can be acts of magnification. A reading of a text says as much about the interpreter as it does about the text itself. Reading thus becomes a self portrait, and a metaphor is a mirror in which the writer hopes each reader will see themselves.
How do we account for absence? What does the structure of a book tell us about how to read it? We fill holes every time we read, but what happens when a text is mostly negative space? When do we become the authors of a work?
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Ioana Dragomir is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Montreal, Canada. She holds an Honours BA in studio practice from the University of Waterloo, an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Western University, and is currently a SSHRC-funded MFA candidate at Concordia University. Her artistic practice combines her interest in writing, literary analysis, and curation with drawing, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, and installation. In particular, poetic methodologies of juxtaposition, metaphor, and slippage are important to her practice. She loves Sappho, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf. She has shown her work with Support, Centre Clark, KWAG, and Cambridge Galleries, among others. She will be an RBC Emerging Artist in Residence at the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery in February 2024.