May 5 – June 12, 2010
The works featured in this edition of IGNITION were selected by Rebecca Duclos, a Montreal-based independent curator, and Michèle Thériault, Director of the Ellen Art Gallery.
Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Gwynne Fulton, Zohar Kfir, Niki Mulder, Tara Nicholson, Sabrina Russo, Marigold Santos
Exhibition Opening
Wednesday May 5, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is pleased to present IGNITION, an annual exhibition that features new work by students completing their Master of Fine Arts degree in Concordia University’s Studio Arts program. This exhibition provides an up-and-coming 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. This year, IGNITION features seven artists whose practices include photography, video, installation, drawing, and sculpture.
Read moreAmélie Brisson-Darveau’s abstract textile sculptures are modeled on the artist’s shadow from which clothing patterns were traced. These phantasmagorical, improbable and unusable clothes possess a rich materiality that references real clothing, but whose function can only be imagined. Gwynne Fulton’s multi-channel sound and video installation titled deep-six de/constructs a meteorological murder mystery from fragments of film, ambient sound, music, dreams, memories, and film noir soundtracks. Out of this vortex of sound and image, one thing emerges with clarity: one cannot predict the weather. Zohar Kfir presents a video projection titled PARA site that asks viewers to consider how storytelling can take place phenomenologically, in the absence of cinematic narrative. Fragmentary cinematic loops evoke displacement, loss, and longing, and hint at an unrealized tale that exists in the interstices between one story and the next. Niki Mulder’s installation features kitchen tables and chairs, craft objects, collages, un-bound books and other documents that chronicle her interest in post-punk/DIY/craft cultures, feminist practices, her aboriginal ancestry, and her involvement with marginal communities. As part of her piece, she will be serving frybread panini during the exhibition’s opening. Tara Nicholson is a photographer who re-investigates historical and emotional narratives surrounding the mythologies of the Canadian landscape, particularly our collective view of northern landscape and distant territories as places of isolation and safe haven. Everything I read and everything I wrote last year, by Sabrina Russo, is a video and sculptural work that experiments with ways of recording everyday experience. Using books and notes related to coursework as material, this work addresses the difficulty in measuring what one has learned and in framing the past in a meaningful way. Finally, Marigold Santos’ large-scale drawings explore notions of multiplicity and fragmentation of the uprooted self, as figures borrowed from Filipino folklore merge with archetypal landscapes.
CloseThe 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.