The Etymologist

In her first exhibition at Galerie Tschudi, Montreal-based artist Maggy Hamel-Metsos (*1997, Montreal, Canada) presents The Etymologist, a continuation of her plaque series. Her process begins with the acquisition of a variety of different metal objects found in what she calls the limbos of ownership, places where people want to get rid of objects either by selling, giving or forgetting. The artist considers these fragments of everyday life for their symbolic and poetic qualities. They are melted into ingots shaped as commemorative plaques onto which the items’ names are branded using metal punches. At times, an object will be melted on its own, revealing its material essence, weight and size. In this sense, the object can be read as edified to a monument. In other circumstances, multiple objects are brought together in a single plaque so as to create a scene or a poem. Either way, the forms are abstracted into words to give place for a new image to arise, the one existing in the mind of the viewer. The process of decreation at the heart of the production of the plaques has to be recreated in the viewer‘s mind with an image that cannot be seen but only imagined. This exhibition The Etymologist shows four works that can be read as verses of a poem that meanders across the architecture of the gallery. Each work comprises a group of objects. In one group we find two kettles, six skillets, four sad irons and one hand. The artist introduces cast iron into her lexicon as a means of appropriating objects that imply domesticity and routine labour. The utilitarian nature of these objects suggest the presence of a body which floats in disarticulated parts across the space. Yet at last, the artist does not leave us wondering. Above, we are offered a form that is not merely a suggestion but the origin of its parts, a missing piece from which we can reconstitute the whole.