The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents Ignition, an annual exhibition highlighting artworks by graduate students from Concordia University’s Studio Arts and Humanities programs. For this ninth edition, curators jake moore and Michèle Thériault chose artists exploring a wide array of topics through an equally wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and embroidery to photography, video, and installation.

Eugénie Cliche creates unconventional scenarios that walk the line between playful and disturbing in what she terms photobroderies where she embroiders over Photoshopped digital images of family members. In her photographic series, Bad Girls, Dayna Danger reworks archetypal female figures often linked to scandal and shame as empowered protagonists who boldly embrace their sexuality and stray from society’s mores. Rosika Desnoyers delves into the material history of needlepoint, looking at this often disregarded amateur art form that was once widely practiced by many European women.

Jinyoung Kim photographs her father’s return to South Korea after over a decade’s absence, posing him against various backdrops that subtly hint at the intensity of the experience. In his multifaceted project Kaval, Bogdan Stoica mines the traditional Eastern European flute as a complex metaphor for immigrant experience and cultural identity in flux.

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The Gallery and the artists gratefully acknowledge Hexagram and CDA for their technical support.