The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is pleased to present IGNITION, an annual exhibition that features recent work by students enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts degree at 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 print media, photography, audio and video installation.

Chris Boyne explores the complexity of memory, identity and place in his work titled blueberry hill. His combination of still images, text and film reflect the sentiment of storytelling and its relationship to his birthplace of Nova Scotia. Simon Brown’s practice as an artist and writer involves subtle and obscure conceptual works that often infiltrate public media formats such as radio or newspaper want ads. Here, he presents a piece based on Michèle Lalonde’s famous 1968 poem Speak White. Jennifer Cherniack’s work plays with the authority of the art historical canon by injecting it with her own personal narrative. The History of Art According to my Archives lists hundreds of potential subjects of inquiry based on the artist’s own experience in the art world. In her second installation, I’m Sorry, Jackson, the artist mythologizes her past connection to Jackson Pollock’s work, and its imagined effect on the course of art history. Karen Kraven is interested in how hand-made, provisional architecture can affect people’s perception of reality. Her sculptural installation This is a Place to Wait Out the Rain, works with sound and optical illusion to create a space of tension and uncertainty. Étienne Tremblay-Tardif‘s installation titled Archéologie de l’échangeur Turcot : journal de recherche imprimé, presents his ongoing research into Montréal’s infamous Turcot Interchange, symbol of Montréal’s modernist urban renewal of the 1960s. Through a confluence of prints, videos, artifacts, publications and found objects from the interchange site, we confront the multiple layers of its historical evolution, its current state of degradation, and the controversial plans for its renewal. Brian Virostek presents a dual video projection titled Reflecting Them and Their Icons Together in Waves. Images and sounds gathered along a river as it cuts through the city reveal people’s connection to it through myth, pollution, leisure and urban development. SONAR, by Sandra Volny, is an audio-visual portrait of the Harting family, a group of blind siblings who are regularly encountered busking in Montréal’s metro stations. Through a series of interviews and performances, SONAR weaves a poetic and sensitive discourse on the meeting of voice and the act of listening in a resonant space.

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 for its technical support.