Bedfellows // Noelle Wharton-Ayer
Exhibition Dates: January 18 – February 21, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday January 18, 2025 @ 5 – 8 pm
Artist/Demostration talk: Saturday January 19, 2025 @ 1pm
This talk is free to attend and open to the public.
Exhibition Text by Diana Swatsky
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Martha Street Studio is pleased to present Bedfellows, a solo exhibition by Noelle Wharton-Ayer (QB).
Bedfellows is a body of work exploring the presence of the botanical in the everyday, and is inspired by spaces of sleep, inactivity, and the ephemeral but essential leaf litter of terrestrial ecosystems. The exhibition proposes an exploration of the speculative qualities of collage through a combination of drawing and analog and digital photography, creating tensions between images that act as document and those that are imaginary or symbolic.
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Noelle Wharton-Ayer is a Québec-City based multidisciplinary artist interested in the interaction between exterior botanical spaces and interior psychological and emotional states. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in visual arts from York University and a Master’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval, and worked for several years as studio manager at the artist-run centre Engramme. Noelle’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Europe, and she has participated in artist residencies throughout eastern Canada. Notable projects include La Cascade, which was selected for the summer 2022 programming of Cooperative Méduse’s Bay Window exhibition space. In 2022, she was also a Première Ovation grant recipient for her project Bushwork / Dans la brousse. Noelle has worked as a community arts practitioner in Quebec City since 2019, and in the spring of 2023 she will be artist-in-residence at Jean-De-Brébeuf high school.
