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IGNITION 12
Yoshimi Lee, Irokawa, La montagne, 2015. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist
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This 12th edition of the yearly exhibition IGNITION gathers works by nine artists selected by Katrie Chagnon and Michèle Thériault, respectively the curator of research and director of the Gallery. In opening up a dialogue between formally and conceptually diverse practices, the exhibition 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. Her installation Suspensus is an imposing floating structure made of suspended ceiling tiles whose spatial unfolding triggers an intricate phenomenological experience. 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. In his series ODD OWNNESS, Nadeau pushes the principle of photographic reproduction to the limits of abstraction by inviting viewers to enter the material fabric of the images. 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. This artist considers the practice of painting as a heuristic inquiry leading to a progressive deconstruction of narrative space, the decomposition of figures and, ultimately, the development of a new gestural, formal and chromatic language.

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 Fields of Memory 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. Borrowing methods from experimental film and new media, these artists build an intercultural narrative, the readability of which is blurred by distorted images, linguistic polyphony and the pounding noise of a construction site. 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. Photographs, texts and videos comprise a poetic world in which real or imagined links are forged between individuals, customs and places conveying a specific cultural heritage.

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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. Created from a stencil thanks to a folding process that systematizes the space of representation, the drawings titled Homothétie du carré and Duplication du carré are “self-reflexive” works before which contemplation becomes a cognitive decoding operation. The circularity of the system is a question that Tom Watson is also closely interested in. Each element of his installation Crush and Burn, which combines plastic brick sculptures and 3D models, is derived from the process that guides the transformation of the manufactured object; here displayed in various states in a hybrid space that seeks to fuse the physical and virtual environments.

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The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.

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.

Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron

I approach sculpture and installation as an inquiry into social and spatial relations. I want to question, unsettle, and bring attention to our sense of embodiment – I am seeking to reawaken in the viewers a more conscious awareness of their surrounding and their corporeal occupation of their immediate environment. I am drawing their attention to the space by making reference to the structures we inhabit. The works become visual metaphors for the various structures we live with and for those that extend beyond the physical construction of our world; whether they are architectural, urban, digital, institutional, linguistic, hierarchical, interpersonal, or psychological.

THE WORK

2015AAB_Suspensus_05Suspensus, 2015
Suspended ceiling system of acoustic tiles, wire

Courtesy of the artist

From the Latin origin of the word, the installation Suspensus conveys not only the meaning of being suspended, but also encompasses notions of suspense, uncertainty, and doubt. The installation, constructed of ceiling tiles commonly employed in commercial and institutional buildings, is hung in the room, imposing on and disrupting the space it occupies. The installation’s form creates the illusion of a distortion, as if bending the space itself. As it is entirely suspended and seemingly floating in space, it loses all sense of weight. It is perfectly balanced, frozen in a moment of grace before the inevitable collapse.

EXPLORE

  • How this installation transforms the exhibition space;
  • The changing bodily sensations that characterize the mobile experience of this monumental work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

abbondanzabergeron.com

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Ivetta Sunyoung Kang / Kevin Junghoo Park / Matthew Wolkow

The three of us are interested in investigating the dynamics of memory through cross-disciplinary relationships between text and image, body and image, and image(s) within an image. These themes are explored in various forms of cinema – narrative, documentary, and experimental. With Fields of Memory, we are now exploring the potential of what we have discovered in alternative forms of new media.

THE WORK

Ignition_FILEDSOFMEMORY_2Fields of Memory, 2015
Two-channel video installation, sound

Courtesy of the artist

Fields of Memory is an attempt to visualize how personal memories “are” in the passage of time. The visual realm of personal memories – constituted of images from each artist’s personal archives, presented with narrations in their respective mother tongues (English, French, and Korean) – is disrupted by the repeated, powerful action of the metallic pounding used in construction. Yet, the archived memories ultimately becomes alive within the audiences’ nowness, experiencing the physical impacts of the piece – glitched images and audiovisual pounding.

EXPLORE

  • The multiple temporalities that this work conveys;
  • The relationships between text and image in the various film genres that the artists explore.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

cargocollective.com/ivettakang

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Yoshimi Lee

Lived experience is the raw material of my practice. The creative process shapes and reworks it. I use photography, video and writing to explore themes linked to my identity as an uprooted woman. In telling the story of my own family history, I seek to understand how being uprooted is lived and defined. My research is guided by core questions such as migration, the possession or non-possession of a social, cultural and linguistic identity, homeland, the burden of the past and memory—whether real, invented, recreated or collective.

THE WORKS

Maeumui gohyang, 2015-2016
Video projection, sound


Presented as a diptych

Irokawa, La montagne, 2015
Inkjet print

Hanbok [01], 2016
C-print


Yukata
[02], 2016
C-print

Courtesy of the artist

This project about being uprooted is conceived as a book comprising several chapters of one family’s story. Each section uses a distinct creative strategy (photography, writing, video and sound) to talk about a subject, a history or a moment linked to being uprooted, such as the search for an identity, quest for one’s homeland, passing down of cultural heritage, and memories of exile. Going beyond a personal exploration of family memory, this work seeks to understand the singular and intangible feeling associated with being uprooted.

EXPLORE

  • The intervention of fiction in the artist’s reconstruction of her family’s history;
  • The intertwined references to Korean, Japanese and Quebec cultures in this body of work.
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Javier Moreno Tamariz

My practice is based on the belief that it is only in action that thought can intercede with matter. Through the process of painting, changing, erasing, wiping over, sanding the canvas, I aim to push further my initial ideas and to discover more interesting forms and colors that are the remaining traces of all of these changes.

THE WORKS

Untitled, 2015
Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2016
Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2015
Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2016
Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2016
Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2015
Oil and soft pastel on wood panel

Untitled, 2015
Oil on canvas

Courtesy of the artist

These paintings represent human, animal or other figures that have been distorted or rendered unrecognizable through gestural brush-work and incompletion. Through an experimental approach, the figures metamorphose and take on unexpected forms and colors. Disrupting the narrative structure and content of the image, this series of paintings develops its own visual language in order to create a dialogue between gesture, color and space.

EXPLORE

  • The concept of defiguration in painting;
  • How this artist works with color.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

javiermorenotamarizblog.wordpress.com

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Jérôme Nadeau

My work navigates the boundaries and expectations that we have towards images. Interested in disrupting their conventions and moving beyond their usually accepted meanings, my work is a reflection on the status of the image in relation to its materiality and on the inherent qualities situated at the intersection of the mediums. Filtered through many transformative methods, I investigate typically unseen production processes while exploring the sensibilities beyond the materials’ predetermined use.

THE WORKS

ODD OWNNESS, 2016
Archival inkjet prints

INSPIRIT SCRIPTS, 2015
Epson K3 ink on unprocessed Kodak Supra Endura paper

MILES AND MILES, 2016
Archival inkjet print

Courtesy of the artist

Proposing new possibilities for photography, not only to challenge its presumptuous link with reality but also to explore its own visual language, the series ODD OWNNESS focuses on a form of image making which investigates the intrinsic individuality of photography. In its repeated reproduction, the works erodes into abstraction and unfolds the many states and stages of what can constitute an image, thus creating an infinite echo of modifications, reconfigurations and recontextualizations.

EXPLORE

  • How these works reveal the materiality of the photographic image;
  • The self-critical approach of photography on which the work of this artist is based.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

jeromenadeau.com

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Vincent Routhier

Rooted in philosophical discourse and a scientific approach, my conceptual and multidisciplinary practice questions the possible complementarity between art and science. In considering translation as a pure creation, I develop systems that are translated into large geometric drawings, mathematical formulas and contextual performances.

THE WORKS

Duplication du carré, 2016
Paper, graphite powder

Homothétie du carré, 2016
Paper, graphite powder

Homothétie du carré’, 2016
Paper, graphite powder

Métadonnées homothétie, feuille de calcul, 2016
Excel file

Courtesy of the artist

These large-scale drawings propose a formal translation of the mathematical concept of homothety. It is by folding the paper several times and by using a shape cut directly from the sheet that the drawing is developed. There is a fold for each graphite-powder printed shape. The drawing is its own tool and its own plane. The number of duplicated forms determines the size of the drawing. Faced with a self-reflexive and conceptually “perfect” work, the viewer can mentally retrace the creation process revealed by the folding traces, the manipulation marks left by the graphite, as well as the negative space.

EXPLORE

  • The reflexive and cognitive dimensions of images;
  • The relationship between a concept and the forms into which it can be translated.
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Tom Watson

In my practice, I highlight the process as an activating principle in the artwork, and to conceptually refigure a relationship to forces of reification. I try to find a point of departure by unpicking the materiality of existing objects, and following an interest. As a working method, I am simultaneously testing the material and imaginative tolerances of our evolving relationship to objects.

THE WORK

Tom_Watson_Crush_and_Burn_2Crush and Burn, 2016
Two-thousand red plastic toy bricks, two MacBook Pro running Blender software, two LCD flat screens

Courtesy of the artist

The fifteen forms rendered in 2000 red plastic bricks in the gallery space as well as in 3D model making software, represent the machine parts necessary to process the plastic into a raw material useful for a 3D printer. Conflating the software environment and the physical space the bricks inhabit, this work is an attempt to jam together two spaces that are normally distinct in practices of screen-based making.

EXPLORE

  • The notion of system in this work;
  • How the artist questions our relationship to objects.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

commonolithic.com

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