Made to Fit illustrates the artists need to alter the world around them. Fabiola Carranza, Charlotte Matthews and Tabitha Osler are compelled to personalize impersonal objects. The works in this show originated with an epistemological inquiry, a 'what would happen if . . .' thought. Their experiments materialized in two completely different forms that seem to bounce off each other like the south sides of two magnets.

 

Tabitha Osler's photoworks act as a filter, pointing the viewers' attention to occurrences she has facilitated. She is a tourist of the amazing and absurd, snapping photos of coincidences. Both staged and improvisational, her tableaus retain a sense of photographic movement and fluidity, although ultimately act as static documentation. Her use of Polaroid highlights the camera's inability to capture detail and adds a certain nostalgic reverie to the work. Osler's interventions are the proof of the whimsical and miraculous.

 

Carry On, by Fabiola Carranza and Charlotte Matthews, is a large scale photograph of the artists as explorers geared up for adventure. Impractical and embellished, the backpack worn by Carranza was altered to carry Matthews. They present themselves as explorers, but fall short; they never make it to the wilderness. If an epic simile is an extended comparison to make a heroic statement, this is an artificial epic simile, a parody. We are able to take them seriously only to a point, beyond that everything is fair game. If you make fun of yourself, no one else will want to.

 

Tabitha Osler is a Vancouver-based artist. Using an economy of means, her work adopts a simplistic engagement with the viewer and relies on absurdity, humor, spontaneity, chance, mischievousness and the fantastic. The audience is often led to a questioning of what is normative behavior in both institutions and society. Her site-specific interventions interact with public space offering a cohesion between art and everyday life. Osler is currently in her fourth year at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

 

Carranza and Matthews have been working together for more than three years. They feel lucky to have found collaborators as exciting as them selves. This fall they will share an apartment and see what real art is all about. Charlotte and Fabiola like to work in film, video, sculpture, photography as well as others too numerous to list. They will graduate from the Emily Carr Institute on the same day in May of 2006.

 

-Julia Marshburn, September 2005