Sylvie Safdie seen by Sherry Simon
Sylvia Safdie: Alphabets of a Passage (excerpt)
The two paintings shown here are a mix of words and images, stains and markings, colours and uneven surfaces. If we read them from the top down, as we seem invited to do, there are two different kinds of progression. In one image, words emerge out of clouds of confusion, out of the formlessness of first beginnings, and hover over a large rock covering a human figure. In the second image, the movement is reversed: the more emphatic, recognizable figures come first: floating, hanging figures that seem to descend, and perhaps return, to the condition of signs, mingling with tiny scrawled upside down words, becoming ciphers in an alphabet of uncertain origins.
When various kinds of signs are brought together on a single page, their presence together raises a question. The viewer wants to assign a relationship to them — to decide if one form speaks for the others, if there is a movement of transformation from one into another, if a stick figure for instance is turning into a human or a human returning to an inanimate state. This question can be seen as a problem of translation: what kinds of passage are possible among these different kinds of languages?
Simon’s text is published in an accompanying exhibition brochure, available at the Gallery.
CAPSULE is an exhibition program that invites a writer from a discipline outside of the visual arts and art history to select a work from the Gallery’s Permanent Collection as a departure point for a consideration of art and issues. Sherry Simon, professor in the Département d’Études françaises at Concordia University and a specialist in translation studies, examines two works by Sylvia Safdie from an oblique point of view.
Exhibition produced by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
THE CURATOR
Sherry Simon teaches in the Département d’Études françaises at Concordia University. She has published widely in the field of translation studies and Canadian culture, and is the author of Le Trafic des langues, Gender in Translation, and most recently of Translating Montreal. Edited and co-edited volumes include Culture in Transit, Translating in the Postcolonial era (with Paul St-Pierre) and New Readings of Yiddish Montreal (with Pierre Anctil and Norm Ravvin). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Killam Research Fellow (2009-2011).
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Anctil, Pierre, Norman Ravvin, and Sherry Simon, eds., New Readings of Yiddish Montreal / Traduire le Montréal Yiddish. Ottawa : University of Ottawa Press, 2007.
Simon, Sherry. Culture in Transit : Translating the Literature of Québec. Montreal : Véhicule Press, 1995.
Simon, Sherry. Hybridité culturelle. Montreal : Éditions Ile de la Tortue, 1999.
Simon, Sherry. Translating Montreal : Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
Simon, Sherry, and Paul St-Pierre, eds., Changing the Terms : Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa : University of Ottawa Press, 2000.
THE ARTIST
Sylvia Safdie was born in Aley, Lebanon, in 1942 and lived her first years in Haïfa, Israel, before moving to Canada in 1953. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Concordia University in 1975, and her work had been part of several exhibitions in Canada and foreign since the end of the seventies. Her art production had also been considered by many authors and some of her art works are actually part of museum collections. Sylvia Safdie lives and works in Montreal.
THE WORKS
Notations, pg. 123, 1997
Graphite, earth and oil on Mylar.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University.
Purchase – Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Acquisition Endowment, 1998.
Notes from my Journal, pg. 490, 1997
Graphite, earth and oil on Mylar.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University.
Gift of the artist, 1998.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Campbell, James D. Sylvia Safdie. Montréal : Centre Saidye Bronfman, 1987.
Daskalova, Rossitza. Mindful movement: Rossitza Daskalova contemplates the world of Sylvia Safdie. C Magazine no. 66 (2000) : 22-26.
Lamarre, André. Sylvia Safdie. Montréal : Dictions, 1995.
Wajcman, Gérard. Sylvia Safdie : Other Places / Autres territoires. Paris : Services culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada, 2000.
Zantovska Murray, Irena. Sylvia Safdie : The Inventories of Invention / Les inventaires de l’imaginaire. Montréal : Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2003.