Exhibition statement:

 

Drawing from everyday encounters in parks and city streets, Jessie McNeil assembles fragments of urban life into layered compositions attentive to the infrastructures of care. For over a decade, McNeil has explored the built environment and the containers that hold and shape our lives. Since becoming a mother in 2020, McNeil has turned toward the embodied, often invisible, forms of reproductive labour that sustain daily life. Echoing feminist philosopher Zoë Sofia’s notion of “natural container technologies,” these works foreground caring bodies—male, female, and nonbinary—engaged in the continual choreography of holding, bending, and balancing.