POEMPAINTINGS

Solo Exhibition of Paintings by Brenda Clews

January 2014 - February 2014

"Where else do you flee but into the many? How else do you combine yourself?" 

Brenda Clews’s work explores the strange fertility of the body and its multiple resonances in intersections of writing, painting, and videopoetry. Poem fragments are written into paintings. Or a painting evokes a poem that is later written into it. She may dance a poem while wearing a mask which has emerged from a painting. She is a multi-media artist whose approach to a topic includes poetry, painting, theory, dance, recordings, and video. Brenda's oeuvre focuses on the plethora, multiple callings, the obsessive muse, the prism rather than the spotlight, or on multiple spotlights. She writes, "Where else do you flee but into the many? How else do you combine yourself?"

Brenda Clews’s work will be on exhibition at URBAN GALLERY from Thursday January 9, 2014 to Saturday March 1, 2014.

Artist Brenda Clews will be in attendance at URBAN GALLERY during her exhibition these dates:

Brenda also arranged Poetry Salons during her exhibition:

Wednesday January 22, 2014 • WINTER SNOW BALL: An evening of Queer poetry/Music/Performance hosted by Philip Cairns

Wednesday January 29, 2014 • A PERFORMANCE POETRY EVENING featuring Luciano Iacobelli and Brenda Clews

BIO

Brenda Clews is an African-Canadian poet, painter and video poet born in a small mining town in Zimbabwe who lives in Toronto. She has edited textbooks, written articles for newspapers, taught yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting.

She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago. Brenda has had solo art shows at York University and in 2013 at Q Space and a solo show at Urban Gallery in 2014, and been in a number of group art shows including ‘5 By 5’ at The Gladstone Hotel in 2013.

Her artwork has appeared in several books and as journal covers. Her poetry has been published in various books and in print and on-line journals over the years. LyricalMyrical published her chapbook,'the luminist poems' in 2013. She has a poetry book forthcoming with Guernica Editions.

She cites her early years spent barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people, in the jungle of Kafue National Park in Zambia, for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.