Selected Past Solo Exhibits
Three Chores
Using the visual vocabulary of housework and craft (especially craft involving yarn), Three Chores imagines three improbable or impractical work flows. Mierau turns naps into make-work projects, uses a crochet hook to create a plumbing problem, and lets other things that need doing go on way too long. Wool, silk, beeswax and hair are mishandled and over-handled in ways that magnify the failures of the artist’’s body, and which rule out the possibility of any practical outcome.
The installation consisted of three videos, each with a related pillow that sat on the gallery seating alongside gallery visitors.
April 12-May24, 2019
Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts
Winnipeg, Canada
Homemaking
Homemaking is a video installation that weaves together imagery from weekly chores and insect lifecycles. Both of these sources provide a way of exploring tradition and other engrained habits, especially their ability to both provide great comfort and create great great discomfort. in the videos, cocoons, and webs are made by nurses and mothers, laundry is hung by someone in a restrictive knitted larva costume, and the industriousness of insects is embodied by a group of women as they mop a floor, dirty it, and mop again in a continuous loop. At times revelling in the familiar, at other times wanting desperately to break free from it, the artist asks earnestly whether the homes and cultures we spin for ourselves are indeed homes, or if they might possibly be inescapable traps.