PATEL BROWN GALLERY | 21 WADE AVE

Winnie Truong | Herbaria | JuLY 30 - August 27, 2022

The Interior Monologue of A Feminist Naturalist; A Close Reading of “Synaptic Pruning”

She’s exhausted, bent out of shape, tethered by the mother trees.

In Winnie Truong’s “Synaptic Pruning,” a lithe, femme-presenting figure — her alabaster-esque nudity of a highly burnished reptilian scale — is trapped by ashy dead ends and sharp claws. Suspended above a mucusy membrane, she is tied up, ready to be pruned.  

Truong's labour-intensive drawings have evolved into a distinct signature over the past ten years. What were once delicately weaved coifs became hairy, self-described wimmin creatures emerging from cattails. Within Herbaria, her latest solo exhibition with Patel Brown, new works that include large-scale dioramas and a stop-motion animation focuses on the unfettered femmes of the natural world and their disembodiment entrapped in white tape (“Synaptic Pruning”) or a web of their own making (“Weaving, Watching, Waiting”). She is beyond the viewer’s gaze, free from art historical baggage.

  So what becomes of her? 

Her branches are crossed and inward-growing. Her left hand — the one she draws and writes with — is old growth. It needs to be tied back. 

“Don’t you want to guide your shape pattern?” the mother trees ask. 

On a sunny May afternoon, Winnie Truong invites me to her 401 Richmond studio, which she’s shared for many years with the painter Kris Knight. The dioramas are propped up on a table, ready to be framed. They seem to be sunbathing, these paint- and airbrush-treated panels, in their colour gradient expanse.

Near the table is a metal cabinet stacked with hard-covered art books, paperbacks and antiquarian finds: Vitamin D New Perspectives on Drawing, Corrective Beauty Care, Hans Bellmer, and an X-Files DVD.

An open drawer reveals a mismatched array of Tupperware takeaway carefully dividing like-minded pieces of paper. Sinuous green stems, red and yellow flower heads. Dense, individual components, ready to be arranged, pinned, and layered. 

Pruning, they say, is good for you. You will flower, you will grow.

Winnie and I email back and forth during the month of June. We plan another studio visit at the Toronto Animated Image Society, where she will complete her stop-motion animation, “The Trade.” (The visit is cancelled due to COVID finally running its BA5 variant through my household.) As I watch a fluttering white butterfly move across my laptop screen, the gentle undulation of the cut paper leaves eerily mimics the way a breeze makes a tree branch creek in its sway.  

And yet, she feels her skin becoming even more sallow, her cheeks losing their blush, the hands and stems marionette her. 

In early July, Winnie shares the exhibition’s title: Herbaria. The plural for herbarium, it means “a collection of dried plant specimens carefully pressed, labelled, and arranged,” intended to “provide insight into plant relationships, history, evolution.” Winnie Truong’s Herbaria are the femme plants, habitats, and creatures that peek through red dusk or vibrant sea-faring subterranean. They are studies of themselves: tethered to the Supernatural Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction myths and origins of their own making, taking in and processing the cultivation of her own badlands.   

Tie yourself up, won’t you?

- exhibition text by Rea McNamara 

Winnie Truong is a Toronto artist working with drawing and animation to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy and finding its connections and transgressions in the natural world. She has exhibited her work internationally and was a 2017 recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship. Her work has been included on the CBC program The Exhibitionists, and in her recent survey exhibition at Saw Gallery in Ottawa (ON). She has been an artist in residence at the Brucebo Scholarship in Gotland (Sweden) and a past resident at Doris McCarthy Fool’s Paradise in Scarborough (Ontario). Truong received her BFA from OCADUniversity.

Rea McNamara is a writer, curator, and public programmer in Toronto. She has curated and programmed on/offline public projects for The Gardiner Museum, The Drake Hotel, and The Wrong Digital Art Biennale. Her work has been presented at The Art Gallery of Ontario and is in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection. Additionally, McNamara has written on art, culture, and the internet for frieze, Art in America, The Globe and Mail, and more. From 2020-2021, she was the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators with Hyperallergic.