
AO ROBERTS
Sickroom
The University of Manitoba
School of Art Gallery, 2022
"Andrea Oliver Roberts’ Sickroom is a sound and sculpture-based installation bringing together ideas about healing and protection, property and bodily autonomy, care and control. Taking formal cues from garden architecture, the artist has crafted sculptures that resemble wrought iron gates, trellises, and a domed gazebo, as well as miniaturized forms that recall amulets or talismans . . . Mere suggestions of walls and ceilings, these garden structures indicate that a little piece of nature has been tamed, but offer little to no shelter or protection from the elements. And they offer security from trespassers only if tacitly agreed upon notions of property ownership and privacy are upheld.
Drawing on personal experiences of navigating and accessing support as a person with chronic illness, Roberts’ installation reveals the magical thinking that reinforces the permeable, indistinct, and ultimately temporary boundaries between chaos and order, between sickness and health, and between what is yours, what is mine, what is shared, and what can never be owned"
- exhibition text by Director/Curator Blair Fornwald.





Liturgies for Chiron w/ANJU SINGH
THURSDAY MAY 5TH 2022
Featuring electronics and voice (Roberts), drones and strings (Singh), Liturgies for Chiron draws upon the artists’ shared experiences of coming from working-class backgrounds within religious traditions that valourize labour. Reflecting on repetition in both work and worship, Liturgies alludes to the condition of simultaneity: in Greek myth, Chiron is an uncharacteristically wise and well-mannered centaur associated with medicine and healing; in astronomy, it is also the name of a centaur – a small Solar System body with characteristics of both asteroids and comets.
Presented by the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery and Send + Receive: a festival of sound