April 23 – May 21, 2022
Pedro Barbáchano, Snack Witch Aka Joni Cheung, Jin Heewoong, Kevin Jung-Hoo Park, Christy Kunitzky, Laurel Rennie, Aman Sandhu, Holly Timpener
The eight artists in IGNITION 17 share their personal lived experiences, political reflections, and poetic engagements with realities that have affected us and our communities for centuries: experiences of migration, (mis/non)representation of our identities and histories, power relations, and unconscious biases. Their installation, photographs, texts, moving images, or textile works not only decry long-standing problems catalyzed by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, they also propose strategies such as collective actions, radical care, and self-work to effect structural, institutional, and personal change.
In the gallery’s main window facing the atrium, Aman Sandhu’s text-based work and three drawings installed on the inside wall speak to structural racism in cultural and educational institutions and show his skepticism towards the recent popularity of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In the first room, Holly Timpener and Pedro Barbáchano engage with queer experiences of time and space, as well as strategies of collective care. Holly Timpener’s collaborative performance explores the transformative power of the collective embodiment of queer time–the articulation of time experienced by queer people. Pedro Barbáchano’s photographs make up an archive of queer self-portraits, often absent in museum collections. The works act as a source for knowledge production and visibility of queer individual bodies and collective experiences. Continuing a reflection on how to rewrite history, Kevin Jung-Hoo Park’s three projected videos address the particular role of films in colonial efforts.
In the two opposite back rooms of the exhibition, Snack Witch aka Joni Cheung and Jin Heewoong speak to experiences of migration, displacement, and home. Snack Witch aka Joni Cheung presents multiple episodes from her YouTube cooking show on preparing Chinese-Canadian dishes from different provinces. Rather than faithfully transcribing the chef’s descriptions, the closed captions act as dislocated commentaries on cross-cultural migration experiences through the lens of food. In the room right behind Cheung’s work, Jin Heewoong’s installations visually translate the sense of strangeness and the violence that arise from the experiences of migrating to a country other than one’s own and acclimatizing to an unfamiliar culture.
In the fourth and last room, Christy Kunitzky’s installation probes the ambiguity of wrapping as both a protective and suffocating act. This tension translates the contradictory goals of health care under capitalism and the conditional access to essential care. While doubts toward institutional care systems arise, Laurel Rennie’s quilt works ground us back in our individual memories and their potential to provide self-care. The artist sees quilting and stitching as meditation processes to explore imperceptible moments and often unconscious daily labor and ponder cycles of evolution, transformation, and healing.
Marie Martraire
Marie Martraire is a curator and the Director of Collections & Special Programs of KADIST. She was the former Director of KADIST San Francisco, curator in residency at Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn (Netherlands), and program manager at the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium in San Francisco and has worked at various institutions such as the Orsay Museum (Paris, France), Institut Lumière (Lyon, France), and Para Site (Hong Kong). She has co/curated group and solo exhibitions, performances, and film programs internationally with artists such as Pio Abad, Milena Bonilla, Cao Fei, Jeamin Cha, Yin-Ju Chen, Dina Danish, Harun Farocki, Li Ran, Leila Pazooki, Public Movement, Arin Rungjang, Emilija Škarnulyte, Sriwhana Spong, and Hong-Kai Wang. Her writings have been published in Journal for Curatorial Studies, Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, LEAP Magazine, Art Practical, and SFAQ, among others. Martraire serves on the board of the San Francisco Film Cinematheque and is pursuing a PhD in film and moving image studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
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 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. 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.
Projects for IGNITION 17 selected by Marie Martraire, curator and Director of Collections & Special Programs of KADIST, and Michèle Thériault, Director.
ARTISTS AND WORKS
Stemming from documentary photography, my art practice interrogates historical documents. I believe that museums are discursive spaces that employ archeology and historical narratives as instruments for domination or profit before knowledge. I appropriate these instruments to respond to archival absences and gaps. By speculating and imagining alternative histories I displace the museum’s historiographical agency and bestow this authority upon those of us who have been refused it.
WORKS
Shibboleth
Insert I, 2021
41.91 x 33.65 cm
Insert II, 2022
41.91 x 33.65 cm
Hotel, 2022
111.76 x 139.7 cm
Back I, 2022
111.76 x 111.76 cm
Chest II, 2022
111.76 x 111.76 cm
Achilles, 2022
152.4 x 203.2 cm
Inkjet prints on archival paper
Courtesy of the artist
Shibboleth responds to the absence of sexually dissident bodies in institutional archives. Where non-normative sexualities are prosecuted, their historical traces are suppressed and erased. Under such circumstances, queer histories are possible only through speculation. Working with photography and 3D printing, I generate new archaeological artefacts by reworking vernacular nude self-portraits and existing museum objects. These new objects blur the lines between the historical, contemporary, extraordinary, and mundane.
EXPLORE
How does Barbáchano work with fragments of objects and partial views of bodies? What questions do you think he is bringing to the notion of “wholeness”?
The photos Barbáchano works with are covert and anonymous by necessity. How is this anonymity transformed when these photos are presented in plain sight as museum objects?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
I was born on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples, colonially known as Vancouver. My interdisciplinary research-based practice plays with the interdependent relationships between objects, place, and identity to navigate discourses of transnationalism, migration, and diaspora as a Canadian-born Hong Kong-Chinese woman. My research takes form through installations, sculptures, performances, texts, sound explorations, photographs, and videos, as well as accumulations of ephemera that bring attention to things often overlooked.
WORKS
The Montréal Peanut Butter Dumpling Adventure , 2020–
The Alberta Ginger Beef Rumble , 2020–
From the series Soba’s Corner: A Chinese-Canadian Cooking Show
Videos with English (Canada) subtitles, closed captions (C), recipes, transcripts, performances and takeout menu
Videos: 10 min. 10 sec.; 10 min. 57 sec.; performance: 3 + hours
Courtesy of the artist
Soba’s Corner unpacks distinct Chinese-Canadian dishes from specific provinces. Posted on YouTube and disguised as a typical how-to cooking show, another conversation and narrative are hidden in the Canadian English closed captions and the “recipe” linked in the description box.
Food, like art, is not neutral. Looking at cuisines as windows through which to study perceptions of tradition and authenticity, I draw viewers in with the familiar to confront the uncomfortable histories embedded in the everyday.
EXPLORE
Cheung also works under the name Snack Witch. How can snacking—idle nibbling, tentative tasting, in-between meals, distracted munching—be the basis for an alternative research method?
Where food bloggers use long narratives or extended videos to increase their rankings, Cheung’s expands her content to add angles of analysis. Compare the different texts and voices in Cheung’s works. What do they each present?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
In my practice, I engage with the objects found in our surroundings. By producing variations in their arrangement, I attempt to generate new meanings for them. The order and chaos within the used objects’ combinations helps reveal their inherent aesthetic elements. I am currently expanding my practice with video by combining personal text and footage to explore the subtle nuances of my experience of displacement.
WORKS
my name is yours, 2021
HD video on iPhone, mobile tripod and metal rack
4 min. 6 sec.; 58 x 38 x 28 cm
growing hook, 2021-
Selected objects, LED light
Various dimensions
my english is not good enough/mon anglais n’est pas assez bon, 2021
Aluminum, metal, printed text on fabric, LED light
130 x 50 x 50 cm
as if nothing happened, 2022
Single-channel HD video, colour, sound
11 min. 8 sec.
Courtesy of the artist
These works narrate my personal experience as a migrant contemplating this unfamiliar city. I emphasize the transition time and subtle power dynamics that appear in my non-native language as an Asian minority in this current context. With my works, I allude to how an individual faces bias in the negotiation process of quotidian migration.
EXPLORE
In Mynameisyours footage of a building in disrepair is matched with the short comment: “I’m barely balancing.” Looking at Jin’s work, consider the emotional and psychological properties of balance alongside the physical balance at play in his sculptures.
With my english is not good enough/mon anglais n’est pas assez bon, Jin uses a store signboard common to South Korea to display an everyday utterance here in Montreal. Think about the different points and combinations of communication at play here.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
I am a filmmaker and visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. I have experienced several identity crises in my life and my practice has been a way to reflect and find a sense of belonging in this world through the critical gaze of post-/de-colonial ideas and practices. In my work I explore alternative visual strategies that contemplate issues of identity, migration, and home by engaging with themes of memory and recollection.
WORKS
Truth-Production 24 Seconds A Time (And Every Cut Is A Fun Fact)
Lumière Actualités (Indochina) #1, 2022
Lumière Actualités (Indochina) #2, 2022
Lumière Actualités (Indochina) #3, 2022
Video installation: 5 h 36 min. 48 sec.; 5 h 37 min. 36 sec.; 5 h 32 min. 48 sec.
Courtesy of the artist
Truth-Production 24 Seconds A Time (And Every Cut Is A Fun Fact) is an on-going series that extends films’ durations by playing each frame for twenty-four seconds. Using films made by the Lumière Brothers in French Indochina, and by twisting and literalizing Jean-Luc Godard’s statements that “cinema is truth twenty-four times a second,” and “every cut is a lie,” I wish to reveal how cinema has contributed to the production of rationalized time and erased non-Western cultural temporalities through its colonial gaze.
EXPLORE
In addition to the films’ movement, what else has been interrupted or stalled? What emerges for you when not only the films, but your own viewing and thinking is slowed down and out of synch?
What is at stake in approaching the films as visual, historical, and political evidence? How are the films asobjects shaped by colonial ideas? And what are the defining characteristics of this viewpoint?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
In my recent work I investigate power relations through considerations of labour and capital, markers of identity and how they regulate interaction with social structures, as well as the figure of “the expert” and the ways specialized or professional knowledge is created and circulated. Working provisionally, I create sculptures and installations using handwoven textiles and re-purposed elements of the built environment. I reconsider commonly available materials in order to question the significance of their ubiquity.
WORKS
Pets, 2021
Handwoven textiles, mylar emergency blanket, nylon string, yarn, mulch, and found objects
245 x 305 x 153 cm
Courtesy of the artist
With Pets I address the murky interactions between power, control, and care as found in the relationships between citizens and governments, humans and nature, and person to person. I use the action of wrapping in this work as it can be interpreted as both comforting and sinister. I consider how bodies are regulated or shaped in ways that uphold norms relating to productivity, gender, and morality in order to receive social services, respect, rights, or so called “care” in various forms.
EXPLORE
How does the notion of owning something as private property confuse the lines between care and containment?
Examine the different materials Kunitzky uses to wrap her “pets.” What associations do they bring up for you?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
As my body and environment continuously alter, I observe and linger between in- and out-of-body states. Through quilting, patchwork, and stitching, I preserve and distort my memories. I am building a personal folklore over time by letting the images of my subconscious—romanticised and altered memories—develop into an ever-expanding narrative.
WORKS
Myside, 2021
Found fabric, reactive-dye printed cotton, wool yarn, cotton batting.
38 x 46 cm
Private collection
Fruitless, 2021
Reactive dye printed cotton, bias tape, cotton batting, silk thread.
83 x 167 cm
Yes and No, 2021
Reactive dye printed cotton, hand-dyed cotton and silk, found fabrics, cotton batting
86 x 233 cm
Flower of No Tomorrow, 2021
Hand-dyed cotton, acrylic ink, screen-printing ink, silk and cotton thread
39 x 167 cm
Courtesy of the artist
This body of work deals with states of transformation, with the uneasiness, uncertainty, and growth that accompanies mental and physical changes. In my textiles, I combine quick sketches, recorded memories, and automatic writing to capture moments of transition. These textiles are made to be touched and altered; they are malleable like words, bodies, and memories.
EXPLORE
Imagine lying down on Yes and No or being covered by another quilt. How might Rennie’s aim of entrancing the viewer work if your whole body was involved?
As if reading the palm of a hand, choose one of the free-flowing quilting lines in Rennie’s works and follow it. Where do these stiches lead you? What words do they cross? What colours wash over them? What shapes do they pass by? What patterns emerge?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
My installations encompass drawing, moving image, and text. I consider them ensembles of objects that refuse to come into view through institutions’ unrelenting calculations. With my practice, I engage in a critique of whiteness and seek to destabilise the centre-margin rubric evoked in encounters between racialised artists and institutions—engagements that often reify whiteness even by refusal. Through improvisation, I rethink the place of refusal in critique to produce other ways of coming to knowledge.
WORKS
Hiring, 2022
Digital print on vinyl
1350 cm x 400 cm
sufficiently polyvocal, 2021
Lead pencil on paper
29 cm x 21 cm
beyond beyond, 2022
Lead pencil on paper
42 cm x 29 cm
Trypophobia, 2018
Lead pencil on paper, stucco
12 cm x 12 cm
Courtesy of the artist
sufficiently polyvocal and Hiring mark my fixation with the words: We’re Hiring. Two words that have increasingly become sirens to announce new roles for racialized candidates in cultural institutions and universities. Hired into brutal structures—I’ve had an acute anxiety the past few years about what’s being got and how we’re being retold. Losing the apostrophe indicates an ending of hiring, it’s inevitable. I propose that ending is where generative change begins.
EXPLORE
How Sandhu uses the gallery’s public facing architecture. Is the wall an invitation? A barrier? A screen? A billboard? In what ways are identity, representation, and inclusion used by institutions in their interest and as a means of power?
Compare Hiring with sufficiently polyvocal. How do the noisy, simultaneous layers in the drawing stand up to the monolithic voice of the wallpaper? As a viewer, can you too engage in the improvisation that Sandhu is seeking out in his practice?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
A queer, non-binary performance artist, I am investigating internal transformations in durational performance art and their relationship to non-binary and transgender identities. I am interested in finding an accessible language out of which discourses on the connections between these transformations and identities can emerge. I believe that queer resistance is created through performative action and embodied, emotional, and felt change.
WORKS
Queer Time Embodiment, November 20th, 2021
Live performance action: video, colour, sound, 32 min. 19 sec.
With the participation of Anna Valeska Pohl, Holly Timpener, Vera Yun Lee, Yuki Kobayashi, and Cherry Wood
Queer Time Embodiment, Artist Reflection, November 20th, 2021
Digital prints
Courtesy of Anna Valeska Pohl, Holly Timpener, Vera Yun Lee, Yuki Kobayashi, and Cherry Wood
On November 20, 2021, at 8 PM EST, four collaborators and I performed in different places to investigate how queer time embodied can stir global affective change. In opposition to normative family values, capitalist productivity, and historical linearity, queer time is shaped by urgency, risk, and the possibilities in the now. How as queer folks are we aware of time and space? How can we use this awareness in communal resistance to provoke queer futures?
EXPLORE
Reading the artists’ reflections, think about the ways that afterthoughts, reconsiderations, and revisitations are also means of entering or sustaining queer time.
Rather than a single set of events in contrast to normative time, can this be seen as a sampling of an expansive queer time already underway? What other unknown acts of queer time might surround these performances? What might it mean to be accessing queer time alongside other unknown expressions of it?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
www.hollytimpener.wixsite.com/hollytimpener