let me hear you sweat
Azza El Siddique
October 26, 2018 – December 8, 2018
@
COOPER COLE
1134 Dupont St.
Toronto, Ontario, M6H 2A2, Canada
COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Azza El Siddique. This marks the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery.
“Well, time passes and passes. It passes backwards and it passes forward and it carries you along, and no one in the whole wide world knows more about 3me than this: it is carrying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember. Yet, something remembers”.
James Baldwin
Interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, painting, and film, Azza El Siddique explores themes of transformation and adaptation through material exploration. Her sculptural assemblages and immersive installations demonstrate a nuanced approach toward visualizing personal history and family ancestry. Ultimately these objects are material self-portraits that examine pivotal moments of change. The organic environments she creates offer multilayered and non linear narratives in which forms are placed together as stand-ins for personal spaces of habitation and in3mate inner states.
Fascinated by the notion of entropy seen as degradation of matter and energy and its potential to reach inert uniformity, Azza El Siddique questions uncertainty and randomness through states of change. Thinking about how energy can shift and move makes her wonder where it is now and where will it go, and if it can, or when it will cease to exist. What may arise from a ruin that is in a perpetual state of becoming?
Her installation, made of steel structures encased in vinyl that house unfired slip cast, unfired clay and glass, is activated by humidifiers. Set to transform, the works warp, deteriorate and rehydrate. As these events simultaneously happen at their own pace and 3me, it reiterates many facets of life and the suspension and modularity with in the works addresses the fragility and poetics of life. How to process what is inevitable and how spirituality and religion have tried to understand and provide answers to this existentialist question? Azza El Siddique’s installation suggests a new relationship with 3me. By playing with speed and nature, she explores the process of becoming.
Azza El Siddique (b. 1984, Khartoum, Sudan) received a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014 and is a MFA Sculpture candidate at Yale University School of Art, 2019. Azza El Siddique currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.