5th Annual Graduating Students' Exhibition

The 2007 show represents a cross-section of the many disciplines and research activities of the students completing their degrees at Concordia University, whether at the Graduate or Undergraduate level. The twenty-seven students participating in the exhibition are representative of the Faculty's different departments, including Cinema, Art Education, Painting and Drawing, Sculpture, Art History, Print, Photo and Fibres. In addition to the fourteen artists showing in the FOFA Gallery and Vitrines another fourteen artists are exhibiting their work in the VA Building on René Levesque Boulevard, in the VAV Gallery and the VAV lobby.

The Vitrines feature the work of Véronique Ducharme, Anne-Renée Hotte, Nancy Long, Emily Shanahan, and Alexis Vallée-Charest who all suggest some play on the theme of portraiture. Shanahan's work comes out a series of figures and animals located in a landscape, or rather, which emerge from the landscape. Lone Dog and Two Dogs (2007), exhibited here, are painted in acidic colours and placed in roundels, and call to mind the 18 th and 19 th century English tradition of animal portraiture. Whereas Stubbs and Landseer portrayed the prized animals of the elite as a symbol of wealth, Shanahan's work defies the specificity of such depictions and creates a sense of illogic and discomfort in what could easily become sentimental and saccharine.

Anne Renée Hotte's Portrait de familles (2007) is a video installation that is an outgrowth of a three-year study of her family. Typically staged and anecdotal in nature, her work presents the family unit as complete, intense, quotidian and so real that it veers toward the surreal. The current work questions the ways in which families choose to represent themselves, and how individuals take up their place within the unity. Invited to pose as they wished, we watch them negotiate their self-portrayals as they observe their stances and spatial relationships on a monitor. Historically the artist controls - or at least confers with - the subject of the portrait, but in this process Hotte has relinquished authorship of the images and is given the opportunity to observe the self-construction of each grouping.

By contrast, Alexis Vallée-Charest carefully stages depictions of his contemporaries engaged in situations and activities that reveal something about their identities. Ciné-Parc (2006) represents two figures posed in front of a blank drive-in movie screen. The scene, like all of Vallée-Charest's work, is simple, purposely banal, speaking of popular culture, everyday reality and the state-of-being of contemporary youth. Underlying this image however, is a strong pictorial formality as well as an ironic narrative element.

Véronique Ducharme's work, é lia (2007) comes out of a series of five contemporary portraits in which the figures are posed, employing a visual language that recalls religious archetypes and their rhetorical gestures. The portrait of é lia evokes the paired down beauty and lighting encountered in a Vermeer painting. The composition of the portrait is classical, with é lia looking over her shoulder, her face at the centre of the image in which she appears as a contemporary Madonna. Ducharme views this work as a reflection on Quebecois society, individualism, and identity. Isolated physically and psychologically in an interior, an unanswered question seems to hang in the air.

At first glance Nancy Long's work, Cakes My Mother Never Made (2006-2007), might not seem to fit the portraiture model proposed above. However, the work can be seen as a propositional portrait of her mother and her through an experience that never happened - more an anti-portrait of their relationship, that did not include Betty Crocker-like scenes of nurture-as-baked-good. Long does not resent her childhood lack of culinary mother-child bonding, but proposes to fill the gap in experience through memory and association. Her installation comprises five specialty cakes, shaped like a house, a train, a heart, etc. displayed with their recipe cards and paintings of the cakes on segmented canvases. The fact that the cakes are made of artist materials reimposes the fiction and establishes a gap that reveals nostalgia and memory as mutable and subject to reconstruction.

In the Main Gallery various works find natural sympathies - Caitlin Durlak and Kate McCain's pieces are reflections on contemporary society, Camille Altay and Victor Dima's works both reference alchemy, Louis Perrault and Sigrun Jenny Bardadottir consider interventions in the environment, and k.g. Guttman, Matthew Thomson and Rosalie D. Gagné base their work in time/sensory experience. Murmures internes (2007) is an installation by Rosalie D. Gagné that creates a multi-sensory experience for the visitor. Several hand-built amphoras, with spouts that recall phonograph trumpets, draw the visitor toward them in what Rober Racine described as a "little theatre of whispers" (un « petit theatre des chuchotements ») in many voices and languages. The organic shapes of the pots also emit the scent of bees wax, and taken all together the work forms a sensory experience that is at once multiple, restrained and poetic.

The bodily experience is also present in Matthew Thomson's assemblages, Cause I Buried You (in the fortress) , Defragmenting (mercury separating) , and The Shipwreck (burial), (all produced in 2006). Integral to Thomson's process is his physical infiltration of the city's streets, alleys and hidden corners where he finds echoes of human experience, "a world of possibilities and constant transformation". In his wanderings the artist collects objects that he arranges in shadowboxes that call to mind the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters or even Baroque "curiosity cabinets" which brought together random objects reflecting the many interests of the collector.

k.g. Guttman's drawings, Intrusion Series #1 and #2 (2006-2007) reflect her background in dance. Like the choreographed movement of dancers Guttman's drawings use time, space and movement. Often founded on a performance or an art action, her work is then translated into an object, drawing or diagram, as if they were a trace of the original physical action. With the Intrusion Series she is working from an interest in the disruption of one image through the intrusion of another, in order to allow an interstice or a concretion to occur. Her process is intuitive and experimental, and her use of masking tape allows the ongoing repositioning and reconfiguring of the elements on the page, continuing the flow of time and movement in her work.

An engagement with the environment shows up in both Louis Perreault and Sigrun Jenny Bardadottir's work. In Perreault's La mémoire des brindilles series (2007) his large-scale photographs document the traces of his passage through the landscape. Through small interventions - walking through long grass, carving a small hole in the ground, or setting a tiny fire smouldering - he leaves an echo of his presence, a marker of time that will eventually be erased by nature itself. His practice attempts to address the meaning of "being at home" or "feeling at home", and whether the sense of belonging is incompatible with a desire to explore the unknown.

Sigrun Jenny Bardadottir's drawing on mylar, Harmony Interrupted (2007), also traces passages, erasures and overlayering. Delicate renderings of animals and natural elements in undefined space are linked with a series of dashes to mysterious figures, partially obliterated, in a space that seems to exist behind or beyond the other. Bardadottir seeks to illustrate that there is an order in chaos, connection and interdependency between all things. She sees the world as a system of indissoluble interrelations - of nature, systems of ecology, communities, and past with present.

Alchemy is the art of transforming one material into another, more valuable substance. Victor Dima's artist's book, Half Noise (2007) is a collection of poetic musings and drawings that explore the artist's subjective state, his struggle to create a personal vocabulary, and a system of belief to carry him through his life and work. Working with subconscious pairings he allows the words and images to reflect upon and inform one another, and in the process create mutable understandings.

Camille Altay's large-scale painting, Post-Aurora-boreal Rip (2007) appears to draw on the subconscious in it's dream-like imagery. Similarly, her process is guided by the application of materials that give forth their imagery. Her painting is a meditation on the moment of impact between a body and the event horizon - the line that separates the inside from outside, the disappearance of an object (or the beginning of its altered existence?), as it slides into the inescapable void of a black hole. Altay's painting has a quality of William Blake's visionary drawings, of an alien world - both strange and familiar, but with an internal coherence and logic knowable only to its residents.

The projection gallery is the site of Kate McCain's synchronized video installation, Talking to You is Impossible (2006). One screen features movie footage of a roaring dinosaur, the other shows the artist frustrated in her attempt to speak and be heard. Viewers must situate themselves between and choose where to focus their attention. They are intruders on an impossible conversation. McCain views the dinosaur as a metaphor for absence, disability and disguise - its small arms relatively useless, extinct and its semblance mostly the product of conjecture. She sees similarities between the dinosaur and herself in a culture of isolation and estrangement, where she struggles with shyness and a feeling of invisibility.

Caitlin Durlak's silent video Runner (2005) is a humorous observation of the behaviour she noticed on commuter trains, where she witnessed business people ludicrously holding meetings on cell phones in train washrooms and obsessively text-messaging, the corporate ethos squeezing into every spare moment. At the station they pour out of the train and sprint for their cars in order to beat the others to the exit, like marathon runners in business attire. The absurdity of the scene is highlighted as the camera follows one figure race across the lot, past the parked cars and into the adjoining field.

Congratulations to all the 2007 graduating Fine Arts students.

Lynn Beavis,
FOFA Gallery Coordinator

Link
http://gradshow.concordia.ca