The gallery is pleased to present new work by Jade Rude, opening Saturday, March 23 and continuing until Saturday, April 27.

A textual banner usuallv celebrates an accomplishment. a milestone. It is an announcement. Jade Rude’s banners exalt fragility and a sense of despair. This series was undertaken while the artist was facing a host of health challenges, requiring an adjustment to making work. Rude chose to work with thick felt. promising some sculptural heft while still a soft.malleable material which could be cut by (one) hand. Text has long featured in her practice, for its specificitv and elasticity. often creating a circuit between material choices and chosen form, leading Rude to look at the existing, textual structures of both Captcha and celebration banners which shared a qualitv of flexibility. This satisfied a requirement to their bearing as non-static sculptures, with potential change alwavs at play. While her phrases acknowledge emotional fragility and frustration. an intentional structural humour intercepts anv bleakness. They are simultaneously declarative. subtle. accepting. unrelenting.

Jade Rude’s accompanying works under the title, Remnants, use the offcuts from her textual felt sculptures as working material. Rude determined that “what is left” retains some potency, and perhaps even acquires a kind of poignancy, as spelled out in the diptych, Remnants of You and Me. The irregular fragments from the excised letterforms are configured by chance, as Rude drops them onto the support and adheres them in place (retrieving any strays to assure the integrity of the remnant as “whole”). Materially, they are the residue of language — not subtext, as that would imply veiled meaning, and there is no masquerade here — but perhaps afterword, that observation that comes at the end of a text, that only reveals itself through the act of writing.