It’s late March, one week prior to the opening of Gabrielle Funk’s show Psychopomp at Gurevich Fine Art, when I climb the stairs to her new apartment on Assinaboine. Gabrielle’s spent more than a hundred hours making points over the last two weeks.
Her breathtaking pointillist self-portraits feature human figures and animals, born out from what she calls an “obsessive” practice.
The concept for the show has, according to Gabrielle, “come to fruition over the last few months.” Originally, she had planed a more conceptual, structured show based on a book she read this past fall. But after a recent parting-of-ways with her partner and the studio space they shared in their home, the show took a different direction. Psychopomp “emerged in a very natural way out of a pretty raw, transitional emotional state,” Gabrielle says. Each piece serves as “a sort of spiritual identity” simultaneously representing Gabrielle herself as well as a kind of spiritual guide through a state of transition “from one self to another.”
Gabrielle busies herself, making tea, adding more detail to the last self-portrait to join the show, pulling old work from an antique trunk, shooing her cats away from me and my allergic nose. We sit down to talk more about her work.
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