IGNITION is an annual exhibition that features new work by students currently enrolled in the Studio Arts or Humanities graduate programs at Concordia University. It provides an upandcoming generation of artists with a unique opportunity to present ambitious, interdisciplinary works in the professional context of a gallery with a national and international profile. Graduate students work directly with Gallery staff to produce an exhibition that places an emphasis on critical, innovative, and experimental work, engaging in the exploration and consideration of diverse media and practices. IGNITION is of interest to all students and faculty, the art community, and the general public.
May 5 – June 4, 2016
Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang / Kevin Junghoo Park / Matthew Wolkow
Yoshimi Lee
Jérôme Nadeau
Vincent Routhier
Javier Moreno Tamariz
Tom Watson
Projects selected by Katrie Chagnon, Curator of research, and Michèle Thériault, Director
Opening
Wednesday, May 4, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
In opening up a dialogue between formally and conceptually diverse practices, the 12th edition of IGNITION proposes an exploration of the various systems that structure perception, cognition and memory, or that determine the very production of the image, its intrinsic functioning and its relation to a context.
Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron, who has a background in architecture, manipulates the coordinates of the built environment so as to reveal the perceptual mechanisms that are at play in the organization of our physical and social surroundings. Through an exploration of the materiality inherent in image making, Jérôme Nadeau’s work fosters a self-critical approach to photography based on the mechanical, chemical and digital processes that make it operative as an autonomous reality. With Javier Moreno Tamariz, it is the pictorial system that is the focus of continuous experimentations based on the idea of a thought in action.
Other artists brought together in this exhibition focus their research on the mnemonic field where memories are constantly collected, combined and actualized as time passes by. In this perspective, the video installation produced by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Kevin Junghoo Park and Matthew Wolkow activates two temporal registers: that of personal memory, which is shaped in duration, and that of the lived present, which interrupts the durational continuity at every moment by causing new events to arise in consciousness. On a more intimate note, Yoshimi Lee’s narrative work places family history at the centre of a quest for identity driven by a lived experience of being uprooted.
Through the visual transposition of mathematical concepts into large-scale geometrical drawings, Vincent Routhier takes up the notion of the system in its truly philosophical sense. Using other strategies, Tom Watson explores the circularity of the process that guides the production and the transformation of the manufactured object.
Following the previous editions, IGNITION 12 thus provides a way of thinking extensively about interdisciplinarity and artistic experimentation.
This exhibition is part of the Montreal Digital Spring 2016.
