FOFA Gallery

Kim Waldron implicates herself in the disquieting diptych, Before and After, an extract from the series  Beautiful Creatures, wherein she investigates the fractured and fictive relationship many have between the production of animals into the food that we eat. By performing the act of slaughter herself, she complicates the narrative and disallows herself distance from the subject matter, indeed the subject, or animal, itself. Cool, clean, and elegant, the quality of the photographs seemingly extracts the emotional potential from a perceived moment of death. Drawing on the complex social histories of documentary photography and self portraiture, Waldron puts into play the constructed nature of our beliefs and social mores.  The images inability to provide us with a complete account creates a resonant dischord and fosters an uneasy and complex engagement on the part of the viewer.

Amanda Craig has a seemingly lighter hand in the text based works WHAT HAPPENED and I AM NOT IN THE MOOD wherein found text fragments from TV and online sources co-mingle with personal observations from journal entries, memories, and reconstructed conversations to conflate ideas of intimacy and vulnerability within the public realm.  The disjointed sentences are engraved into metal discs, the labour of their construction belying the incisive nature of this kind of questioning that presents issues of sexuality, gender, and femininity.  The discs were inspired by love tokens transferred covertly by British prisoners made up of small coins repurposed through engraving with personal messages and the confection candy love hearts. The disparate nature of these two examples of messaging emotion points to the complexity of desire and its reception.

Adam Basanta presents, in collaboration with Max Stein and Julien Stein, Music for 12 Lamps. The installation is comprised of computer controlled domestic lamps and 14 channel sound.  The lamps have each been discretely outfitted with a surface transducer speaker that seemingly gives each a distinct voice within an immersive environment.  This array of everyday objects performing their intended tasks in a choreographed and amplified manner, complicates both their quotidian though invaluable function and calls into question the ubiquity of the screen as the illuminating presence in both the art world and everyday life. Soft seating arranged throughout the piece allows us to fully experience the immersive nature of the work as well as problematizes notions of the stage and performer in time based works. During the vernissage, the collaborators will occupy the installation in a performance, repurposing the actants within the piece again. 

Tears of Inge by Alisi Telengut is a deeply moving animated film painted frame by frame on one still surface using the under-camera animation technique.  The hand crafted surface made though the persistent application and removal of colour is in stark contract to the computer generated standard of our time. This amplification of the artist’s hand adds poignancy to the traditional Mongolian nomadic story about human animal interdependency narrated by her grandmother in a recording made while visiting her grand daughter in Montreal. Telengut uses her distinct style to record and lovingly retell the legends and nomadic traditions of her family, a way of life slowly disappearing.

The carefully crafted porcelain sculptures of Laura Hudspith make up the multipart components of the series Feast your Eyes.  Using the common form of pie as a stand in for desire, the individual servings call to mind nursery rhymes and their role of telling the unspeakable stories of their time in more palatable and seemingly childlike methods. Here, slip cast birds made of unglazed vitrified porcelain transform from objects into characters in this study of social ideals. The pies serve as stages and perform as both “nest and cage, breeding ground and territory” playing out the darker sides of relationships, constructions of community, and ultimately human nature. When couched in this material iteration, these dramas seduce us with pristine surfaces and the carefully wrought figurines. The method of making articulates both the care required to maintain, and the constructed nature, of the social structures they represent.

Laurence Poirier sings radio hits of her choosing to a series of friends in her video project Réactions. She stays off camera and instead focuses her lens on the responses to her delicate soprano, delivering with apparently deep sincerity such hits as “Lady in Red” and “True Colours”.  Each responder has a certain unease or self-consciousness that seems less about the camera trained on them than the act of singing.  It is somewhat oddly an act of daring for each voice is so deeply unique and fully tied to the body - to sing directly to someone is to starkly reveal something of your self. In so doing, Poirier makes the act of portraiture to be one of reciprocity. The emotions revealed in the face of this exchange hint at the political potential in this gesture toward another being.

Lauren Osmond transcends traditional garment construction with her use of kombucha, a “symbiotic system of lactobacillus-acidopholus bacteria and yeast aided with sugar and green tea”, in creating a costume for dance that is at once both actively growing and decaying.  The raiment is worn by dancer, Kim Fleury-Bertrand in the textile and dance performance Fabrication shot in the historic Bain St. Michel pool in Mile End.   As she moves throughout this now empty tank, the fabric is undone by the heat and moisture produced by her body as it seemingly resists containment within this costume.  Clothing is deeply connected to the performance of identity – director and costumer, Osmond, complicates its reception through this fragile but extant surface.  In the black box, the projection of the performance flickers on the wall above the costume laid out like a specimen on a light table. Now disembodied, the garment seems oddly even more skin-like.

Marie-Pierre Lortie also uses the language of clothing as a site for articulation of the self in her project, Memory Playback; a coat of nostalgia. The seemingly simple vest is embedded with electronics and sensors that when triggered through the simple act of pulling on a thread, plays back sonic souvenirs.  This materialization of memory renders the garment as a site of engagement for the wearer, wherein it is function is not the comfort of the body usually expected from outerwear, but instead a somatic and psychic intermingling.  Lortie will wear the vest for the vernissage as the artifact alone doesn’t demonstrate the affective potential of wearing one’s past.

Cédric Joyal uses humour and a simple narrative style to convey a potentially provocative story of a young woman becoming aware of her father’s sexuality. There are Three Bears in a Bed is an interactive website that tells a story of self actualization and the healthy interaction of family members in a comic slide show style. The recollection by our heroine of how her family came to be, highlights the actual concerns of children in the face of their family as opposed to those imagined by straight society. When she describes the rationale for moving in with her father and his new boyfriend it is due in no small part to the proximity of their home to her new college and the cooking skills of the boyfriend.

 

Aaron Leon produces bucolic landscape images that are at once psychedelic and sublime using a tri colour photographic process that uses sharp cutting filters to separate the red, green and blue portions of an image.  This spectral unpacking can lead to subtle shifts that suggest early 3D technologies.  It can also create planar shifts that challenge the art historical conventions of background, middle ground, and foreground and destabilize our perception of the landscape as whole. These mediated ruptures in the image point to the role we play as observers in the construction of what we see, for a photograph produced in this manner is an index – It has not been altered using digital tools.  The historical role of the photograph as evidence further adds to the powerful affect of these works.

  

The artistic practice of Jennifer Cherniack looks at language development and its distribution systems. The three projects here, The One with all the Posters, The One with the Sarcasm and The One with the Lord’s Name in Vain, work specifically with  the language used in the hit 90s sitcom Friends to consider how youth culture and early web communications permeated the mainstream. She uses Friends “as a textual database, considering narrative, cultural, linguistic and historical text to celebrate incongruity in popular methods of communication during the mid 90s. From a lack of vocabulary to misuses and mistakes in language, The One. . . looks at how the spaces in between one thing and another can contribute to our understanding of communication.” 

Jacinthe Robillard uses multiple documentary formats of standard photography, video, and referent, to produce this complex portraiture series. The title of the project, L'étendue de mes connaissances, ( the scope of my knowledge) hints at the embodiment and sensorial nature of knowing, or rather, coming to know, that interests her.  She has created a seemingly neutral environment and set out a defined task complete with diagrammatic instructions for friends and family members to enter into.  She documents them in the process of understanding the diagram and performing the task of folding an origami paper crane.  The unique gestures, shifts in posture, facial expression and subtle expressions of sound deliver on her search for signs of the individual revealed in a moment of solitude and the intimacy of watching someone learn.

 

With Hobby Horse I and Hobby Horse II, Emily McIntyre presents a team of multiples that can be bought and sold.  They are similar to so many objects in commodity culture and are constructed like knock down furniture making them easy to assemble and reproduce.  Their “skins” are digitally printed silk organza that allows us to see their surface quality but also reveal the structure within. McIntyre has built the structure to match her own height as an implication of herself into the project and a subtle indication of the desire to use the horses as potential mediators between herself and the audience. In this installation the ponies are back-grounded by the wall mounted print and embellished work, Quit Horsing Around, and almost heraldic representation of the family to which the hobby horses might be members within.

 

 

VAV Gallery

Through the deconstruction of biological formations, Elizabeth Brouillard’s A Personal Research Book calls into question the ways in which individuality is or is not biologically determined. Playing with the idea of empirical research, a suitcase contains various coloured ceramic balls mimicking organic structures, glass slides containing drawings/paintings of small creatures, and a personal research book littered with existential questions, begging to be answered. In placing these objects within the suitcase, Brouillard’s work asks the viewer to “come along for the trip,” the final destination and the final answer remaining unknown.

 

The dichotomous relationship between domestic and public spaces has played a significant role in the contextualization of art. When deconstructing longstanding notions of site specificity and the role it plays in the aesthetic understanding of these spaces, it is crucial to look at how the interplay between the two can be challenged by creating a destructive aesthetic environment. Sarah Sanford’s series Bedroom Transmutation is an exercise in the destruction of domestic spaces. The home, which is seen as a source of comfort and peace for many people, has been deconstructed and destroyed. The use of temporally based objects allowed for Sanford to showcase the decay of these objects. These photographs showcase dematerialization of objects as being a powerful act that is doubly solidified in the decision to capture them within the realm of the domestic.

 

Through the use of various printing techniques and collage, Noemie Ouimet Meloche’s series of prints present a playful world where fish fly and one spends countless hours looking at the vast distance of the ocean. In layering images on top of one another, her work plays with the constructed-ness of memory, how small fleeting moments often get lost behind the minutiae of every-day life. And while the viewer is not readily aware of just whom the smiling faces in these images are, one’s own affective relationship to the scenes draws us in further.

Melanie Perreault’s A Fantastical Mess begins with found objects that then multiply and take over a space, be it her friend’s apartment or a gallery space. These objects, ordinary in their construction and uses, take on a more fantastical life as they expand and populate the space. This specific installation, utilizing the rear portion of the VAV Gallery, will be built over a three-day period prior to the graduating students exhibition. The uncertainty of just how this process will unfold is a large component of site-specific work; the work adapts to the space rather than in reverse. For the viewer engaging with the work at the end of this process, what is evident is how the concrete materiality of the objects in Perrault’s “fantastical mess” take on a temporal dimension. As one walks through the space, the evidence of how the mess was created, not just its final state, becomes abundantly clear.

Portraiture as an art form has evolved from being a practice of artists capturing the wealth and power of their patrons to invoking the artist’s own vision of their subject. What is important about portraiture is that while specific parameters for these types of works mostly remain unchallenged, the most compelling aspect of this style is what an artist captures of an individual versus what has been left out. Sara Anstis’ Posturers series has an individual depicted primarily through their facial expressions and features; her careful line work allows for the subject’s face to be the focal point while the rest of the subject, beyond simple line work, fades into the background, deteriorating and challenging traditional portraiture that demands a detailed encapsulation of an individual.

Sara Maston’s Flower Paintings render simple organic arrangements in bright hues, though as one looks closer, a subtle undertone of loss and death lingers among the stems. The symbolism of flowers, as both a potential beginning and a customary way to mark an end are unsettling; just who is being mourned or what is being celebrated in never readily apparent. Her ceramic Dog Party in contrast, places animals in everyday situations, from shopping at the store to lying on a hospital stretcher. By taking banal or extremely emotional moment and anthropomorphizing dogs and camels, the negative emotions associated with these events turns into the fantastical. Little snippets of life that might otherwise disintegrate as memory passes become carnivalesque as dogs push shopping carts while wearing bunny slippers and a camel acts as a serving tray for an ill friend.

Weaving as a practice allows for fragments to create a new image that has been taken from its original source. As an artistic medium, weaving has not been given the recognitions for the complexity of its’ practice due to the gendered implications of weaving being a feminine craft activity, not “art”. Jessica Monuk’s series His Royal Highness has created new works entirely based on photographs taken by His Royal Highness Prince Andrew of Duke for a coffee table book. Monuk has appropriated these original photographs and by weaving these works together, she has successfully combined a new context for these photographs that speak to challenging conventional art making practices. The distinction between high art and feminine craft has been blurred and allows for the continued disintegration of this binary.

The domestic realm has often been relegated as a feminine space where crafts are meant to belong; this antiquated notion of art making and its practices has flourished in normative understandings of what constitutes art. The delineation of art has only allowed a specific context to exist and cross-stitching has not been seen as a part of that art historical context. Veronique Leblanc’s Peenflowers triptych uses cross-stitch subversively by using the method to craft flower penises that are situated throughout the piece. Leblanc’s approach to challenge patriarchal notions of the penis and visualize it in a feminized context not only challenges the notions of high art and feminine art but it also allows for a domesticated practice to be re-contextualized within a traditional art institution that further deteriorate the notion of “Art”.

 

 

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VAV Gallery