FOFA GALLERY

Pierre Julien

Caitlin Livingston

Undergraduate Student Show

April 2-20, 2007
VERNISSAGE: Thursday, April 5, 2007 from 5:30 - 7:30pm
ARTIST TALKS: Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 4:30 pm
BRIAN HUNTER, PIERRE JULIEN, LAURIE KANG, ETIENNE LAFRANCE, DAVID LAQUERRE, CAITLIN LIVINGSTON, CARL OSBERG, ERIK OSBERG, JIM VERBURG

From April 2-20, 2007 the FOFA Gallery presents Our Aim Is True,the annual undergraduate exhibition by students from Concordia University’s Studio Arts Program. Curated by the VAV Gallery Co-Directors Corina Kennedy and Emily Shanahan in partnership with Lynn Beavis, Coordinator of the FOFA Gallery, this juried exhibition showcases a wide range of artistic concerns within contemporary academic practice.

Brian Hunter’s video Alice is composed of looped footage of the narrator’s grandmother on a trip to Grand Beach, Manitoba, in 1957. Through this process of overlapping, manipulation and repetition the artist is able to link the audience’s visual experience with his subject’s actions and memories.

Pierre Julien’s large-scale oil painting, The Tale of the Snail I tells the story of a mythological creature and its journey of transformation by drawing a metaphor between a free form and a snail. The space depicted is one of quiet vibration that mirrors the slow instinctual movement of the snail that travels through it.

Laurie Kang’s series of photographs entitled My Father and I expresses the various emotional and psychological facets of a dysfunctional relationship between father and daughter. Together the two perform and play out their relationship within a constructed environment.

Etienne Lafrance’s large-scale mixed media drawing entitled Théorie illustrates narrative scenes based on themes of loss and deconstruction. The work uses the notion of private disasters as a tool to express a universal understanding of loss and the idea of a collective horror. The seductive treatment of such concepts further plays on the link between atrocity and spectacle.David Laquerre’s mixed media sculptural diptych L’extase de St-Joseph highlights the artist’s artistic exploration of contemporary heterosexual masculine identity. An allegory of the male’s journey in an age of equality, the piece investigates the process of remodeling the traditional masculine identity in the social and sexual sphere.

Caitlin Livingston’s Things I Was Not Born With is a record of every mark, scar, mole, freckle and discolouration that has made its way into the artist’s skin. Each hand-sewn patch of the quilt holds some account of time’s interference with the skin, whether intentional, accidental, or unnoticed, and chronicles what the artist describes as a “history of small things”.

Carl Osberg’s painting Erik and Elif from the series Why Did My Parents Overlook My Overall Lack of Interest in Anything Meaningful? draws from the artist’s vivid cache of adolescent experience. The oil painting, as part of a larger series, narrates the archetypal stages of development within the environment in which these experiences dwell while investigating the inadequacies of a generation.

Erik Osberg’s photographic series depicts the artist and his three siblings reenacting vital instances and family photographs from their childhood. The reenactments in their present embodiments investigate records of social gestation as well as collective recounted memories while distorting the image of the middle class, suburban family.

Jim Verburg’s photographic prints Untitled Diptych in Pink and Green, explore intricacies and dualities in romantic relationships. The incorporated repetition plays with ideas of pairing, duality, opposing perspectives, negative and positive space, the pull between the emotional and the conceptual, passion and resistance, and the ever present representation of homo-imagery and culture which is defining, fading and changing.