IGNITION, is our annual exhibition of selected works from Concordia’s Graduate Programme in Studio Arts. This 4^th edition features seven artists whose practices include photography, video and sound installation, painting, drawing, and sculpture.

Caroline Boileau’s performance-based practice is rooted in the physical gestures and processes that overlap her multiple roles as a hospital technician, mother and art student. Activities such as climbing and measuring form the basis of performative actions that are documented in photo and video. Tia Halliday presents intimate watercolour paintings illustrating various characters negotiating the fraught, emotional space of identity and self-representation on the Internet. With equal amounts of humour and pathos, Halliday reveals the effects of a social world where reality and fantasy are intertwined. Emma Waltraud Howes’ interactive, soft architectural structures contain and impede the viewer’s senses, while prompting them to move within a designated trajectory. Douglas Moffat’s installation titled Montreal Phonograph begins with the question: If the island of Montreal were a vinyl record, what would it sound like? Through the use of a custom-made stylus equipped with contact microphones, the city’s aural texture is recorded and further abstracted through its presentation as sound and image. Mélanie Rocan’s paintings depict a world where childhood memories and anxieties about the present state of the world evoke both pleasure and threat. Jerry Ropson’s relationship to storytelling will be played out through the duration of the exhibition as he creates a large mixed-media drawing directly on the gallery’s longest wall. The drawing’s narrative will continually change, as this ‘teller of tales’ interacts with visitors to the gallery. Cara Sawka’s sculptures are abstract and perverse representations of domestic furniture, recognizable through their floral upholstery fabric and careful craftsmanship, yet completely non-functional in the traditional sense.

The work featured in this edition of IGNITION was selected by Marthe Carrier, Director of Galerie B-312 in Montreal, and Michèle Thériault, Director of the Gallery.

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 CIAM – Centre Interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques, for its technical support.