IGNITION is our annual exhibition of selected works from Concordia’s Graduate Programme in Studio Arts. This 5th edition features six artists whose practices include photography, video and sound installation, painting, drawing, and sculpture.

Steve Bates’s video installation, Radio Forest, is an abstracted representation, in image and sound, of the lengthy network of antennae that run along Northern Ontario’s Trans-Canada Highway, symbolic of transience and communication but also of human presence and absence. Amélie Guérin’s sculptural installations question the paradoxical role of modern, manufactured design objects for the home by re-investing these as objects of contemplation and reflection. Mark Igloliorte’s large-scale painting allegorically evokes the experiences of Inuit youth in the remote, northern communities of Newfoundland and Labrador where he was born, and which today are plagued by high rates of suicide and shifts in cultural and economic values. Through her video installation, Miriam Sampaio attempts to piece together her immigrant family’s history; a past which was largely lived in exile and secrecy, creating what the artist calls a “transgenerational haunting”. Meera Margaret Singh’s photographic portrait series Harbinger, depicts aging individuals in liminal states – in mid-speech, mid-gesture – revealing truth and fiction, pleasure and pain, history and the present. Cronograma de un tiempo inexistente / Chronogram of Inexistent Time, by Malena Szlam explores the architectural possibilities of moving images by projecting digital video and 16mm film onto several layered, textured screens.

The work featured in this edition of IGNITION was selected by independent artist-curator Susannah Wesley, 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 Hexagram and CIAM – Centre Interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques, for their technical support.