Maggy Hamel Metsos

Maggy Hamel Metsos is an emerging artist based in Montreal. Working primarily from a sculptural perspective, Metsos' practice is a negotiation between the singular (the personal) and the common (the cultural). She is interested in the mechanisms of reduction, expansion and abstraction present in language. By mobilizing these same strategies in her material practice, she also invests words within her work. Lately, she has been interested in the transition from child to adult: how the imaginative and sensitive in childhood becomes neurotic and hysterical in adulthood. In the adult, she observes how emotional excesses must pass through a cultural device like a song or a play... It makes us comfortable to know that we can turn the light switch on or off like a mechanical doll. It makes us comfortable to know that we are not at the mercy of our emotions. To be understood, we can't scream or whine. The cost of witnessing comes at the price of neutrality: a sterile, emotionless language. Unless you call it Art, since it's on the margins of a society for which emotion is of no use unless it's part of the cultural sphere of entertainment.