EMB4:1-54 Art Fair
LatchKey Gallery is pleased to present two artists for 2024’s 1-54 art fair. Both representing broken yet pieced together pasts and futures, Marika St. Rose Yeo and Josie Love Roebuck work with tactile mediums such as quilt and ceramic to weave together personal and global past.
Josie Love Roebuck, uses quilting to explore emotional themes of trauma, and healing. The resulting piece is a blend of woven together patterns and fabrics, alongside her own stitching. Roebuck’s work is a mix of many things, one of them being portraiture, featuring faces created out of different shades that create one united whole. Focusing largely on her experience as a biracial woman, these faces identify and unite many previously cast away themes and emotions, and the stitched patterns work together to create a human, unified whole.
Marika St. Rose Yeo works with fired and unfired ceramics, creating cracked and adorned vases. Patterns etched into them reference and connect patterns from the Caribbean, West Africa and Western Europe. This enables her to meld together and gather the meaning and emotion from these cultures, creating a broken but new vessel, united through time. Through this process of ‘gathering’, St. Rose Yeo creates new cultural narratives, beautiful in the disjointed unification.
Roebuck and St. Rose Yeo unite in this booth to reimagine histories and culture to create a new future of understanding. Instead of refusing to respond to events and lineages that bring us to today, both artists put them on the forefront, through textured and layered work. Presenting the two at 1-54 can provide a space of reflection, and reimagining for the audience, in united and broken pieces.
MARIKA ST ROSE YEO
Marika St. Rose Yeo (b. 1992, Regina, Saskatchewan, CA) is a ceramicist whose works and research are concerned with healing, justice and transformation through creative practice, and examining how these allow us to generate possibilities for alternative futures, outside the systems of harm we find ourselves in. St. Rose Yeo works primarily using both fired and unfired ceramics, creating forms that are constructed with fragile layers and cracks.
St. Rose Yeo’s carving patterns on the the surface of her ceramic vessels, referencing floral and textile designs from the Caribbean, West Africa and Western Europe. The piecing together of such forms represent her multicultural heritage and the desire to understand the layers and pieces of her histories and cultures.
Marika St. Rose Yeo has a BFA with a major in ceramics from the University of Regina and a PhD in Critical and Creative Social Justice Studies through the University of British Columbia. St. Rose Yeo’s work has been displayed in galleries across Canada, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2021-2022) The Port Moody Art Gallery (2022) and at the Campbell River Art Gallery (2023). Recently, her work was also acquired for the Canada Council Art Bank’s collection (2023).
JOSIE LOVE ROEBUCK
Josie Love Roebuck (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist from Chattanooga, TN. Her process addresses, hardships and resilience, exclusions and triumphs, and ultimately, the path to healing. Past series have focused on her lived experiences as a biracial woman reflecting on her own childhood to convey stories of her life and that of her family’s.
Roebuck received her M.F.A (2021) at the University of Cincinnati and her B.F.A with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Georgia (2019). She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northern Kentucky University.
Roebuck has exhibited at NADA House, NY with LatchKey Gallery, Denny Dimin Gallery, NY, Christie's at Rockefeller Plaza in collaboration with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Additional exhibitions include Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (2024), Kunstheille Krems Art Museum, Austria (2022) and Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH (2021). Her work is part of numerous private and public collections most notably, A. Boafo, Accra, Ghana, T. El Glaoui, London, UK, Jimenez-Colón Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico Beth Rudin DeWoody, Florida, A. Shariat, Vienna, Austria, C. Shen, Brooklyn, NY and Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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