Installation view of A Malevolently Bad Map by Bridget Moser. Courtesy of the artists. Photos by Blaine Campbell.
BRIDGET MOSER
A Malevolently Bad Map | Upper Gallery
27 JANUARY 2024 - 20 APRIL 2024
Bridget Moser’s new solo exhibition A Malevolently Bad Map navigates the rocky terrain of self-knowledge. Through her unique combination of prop comedy, performance art, video, and sculptural installation, Moser’s humour and absurdity revel in the incongruous emotions of the Amazon age. In A Malevolently Bad Map, Moser takes a more personal tone, meandering through territories of identity formation, overcoming personal struggle, and the consumerization of self-expression.
For Moser, selfhood is not fixed or singular. It is a confusing mess of distractions, moments of acceptance, external pressures, and misdirected internal desires. Moser’s new video, also titled A Malevolently Bad Map is structured through a conversation between a person (played by Moser), a flesh-coloured, beaded towel of a Greek volute krater, and a pair of sentient pants. The person expresses familiar feelings of unfulfillment and that despite working out, keeping hydrated, staying on top of interior design trends, and living in a time and place of privilege, they still feel directionless.
Moser presents identity and self as a complicated texture of affirmations, irrational outbursts, and worries; a far cry from some unified whole. After all of the online purchases, bookmarked self-help articles, burnout, and ugly crying, maybe just trying to locate our fractured parts is enough. It’s like what the peachy volute krater says: “It’s not the fragments, but how they hang together.”
The title to the exhibition references X (formerly Twitter) user @oldbooksguy’s alt-right flirting chart of “15 (Pretty Big) Differences Between Good Art and Bad Art”. Apparently, one of the markers of “Bad Art” is recognizing it as “A Malevolently Bad Map”. The idea of intentionally following a bad map resonates with Moser’s questioning of identity formation. How much of the journey has been predetermined by our personal bad maps and how much of it is a result of just struggling to read the damn thing?
Curated by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Watch Bridget Moser’s performance, THE WORM THAT DESTROYS YOU that accompanied the opening of the exhibition on Jan. 27, 2024
Bridget Moser is a performance and video artist whose work combines strategies associated with prop comedy, experimental theatre, performance art, absurd literature, existential anxiety, and intuitive dance. She has presented work at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Western Front, Vancouver; MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; SPACES Cleveland; and Xing Raum, Bologna. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, Frieze, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Art in America, and Artribune Italy, and she has been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.