Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artists.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
IGNITION is an annual, curated exhibition recent work by students in Concordia University’s graduate Studio Arts program, and, for the first time, the Humanities doctoral program. 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. Students work directly with Gallery staff to produce an exhibition that places an emphasis on critical, innovative, and experimental work engaging in an exploration and consideration of diverse media and practices. This year IGNITION features artists who engage with questions and narratives that are of social, cultural, and/or political relevance in artworks that often bridge documentary and fiction, the personal and the relational, performance and embodied experience.
Inspired by her time spent with senior citizens in rural Quebec, Marie-Pier Breton collaborates with members of this community in the creation of narratives that centre on aging, death, and the passing of time. The highly cinematic video in limbo uses the image of a man and a woman on a dance floor as a poetic reflection on these universal themes. More in the documentary vein, Wren Noble’s photographic series Madame, Monsieur portrays an elderly couple who, over time, as their respective physical and mental faculties diminish, dress in matching, colorful clothing. These vivid portraits function as a celebration of old age while destabilizing traditional expectations around gender performativity and old age. With reference to the Bosnian War of the 1990s, Velibor Božović’s video installation My Prisoner is a haunting exploration of memory. Combining elements of autobiography and documentary, Božović’s profoundly philosophical project grapples with memory’s malleability, raising the questions about how we remember the past and if we can know what is real?
In her performance-based work The Husbands and I, Chun Hua Catherine Dong documents time spent with dozens of white Canadian men within domestic and public spaces. Making the viewer complicit in the role of voyeur, Dong boldly overturns exoticising fantasies of the “submissive” Asian female as well as politically correct notions of multiculturalism, tolerance, and belonging. Joanne Joe Yan Hui’s Expo Daily delves into the Shanghai World Exposition of 2010 as a vector for official conceptions of nationalism in juxtaposition with more fluidly subjective, autobiographical expressions of transnational identity. In this part playful, part pedagogical series of drawings and texts, Hui nimbly mixes references to ethnographic research practices, travelogue traditions, and journalism. jenna dawn maclellan’s a study in greyscale is the result of a recent visit to Cuba where she invited Cubans to consider their relationship to globalisation while being photographed with a pinhole camera. These blurred portraits suggest an open-ended ambiguity, one that reflects Cuba’s position within the global market place as much as the diversity of answers that the artist received.
James Douglas Whitman collaborates with Barry Doupé on Adorno and Nose, a musical body of work featuring several songs as well as sheet music, lyrics, and drawings. This project is a tribute to their joint creative process, one that encourages back-and-forth strategies of play, flexibility, digression, and humour.
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.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Projects selected by independant curator Véronique Leblanc and Ellen Art Gallery Director Michèle Thériault.
The Artists
Velibor Božović grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. When he was in his twenties, the country of his youth became a war zone and he spent the duration of the siege of Sarajevo honing his survival skills. In 1999, Božović moved to Montréal where, for eight years, he worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry until he gave up his engineering career to become a photographer. Božović’s work has been exhibited in Cuba, Canada, the United States, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University where he is the recipient of the Gabor Szilasi Prize (2011) and the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography (2011).
I explore how images influence memory through the role they play when the historical, the fictional, and the personal combine to affect and transform each other. I am interested both in the absence that photographs imply and in photographs as a home for the worlds we have lost.
THE WORK
My Prisoner, 2012
My Prisoner is an investigation of the records and memories I have retained of a specific episode in my life. In 1994, I served in the Bosnian army to defend the besieged city of Sarajevo while at the same time my father was in a Bosnian army prisoner of war camp. The army decided both of our fates: my father was its prisoner and I was its soldier. In My Prisoner I explore the archival footage of our only meeting during the war. The footage is simultaneously propaganda, a historical document, and a record of my personal experience. It is impossible to say where one stops and the other begins.
EXPLORE
- The elements that comprise My Prisoner and consider how they function together to create this multi-faceted work;
- The roles that war and memory play in My Prisoner.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Velibor Božović, web site: www.veliborbozovic.com
Dixon Kavanaugh. Shane. Eastern Europe’s Odd Attractions. The New York Times. Lens Blog, 1 June 2010. Web. 1 May 2012. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/shane-dixon-kavanaugh/
Hundley, Tom. Photographs for the book were a project in themselves. Chicago Tribune, 3 May 2008. Web. 1 May 2012. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-05-03/entertainment/0805020162_1_photography-velibor-bozovic-lazarus-averbuch
Marie-Pier Breton was born in the Eastern Townships (Québec) in 1985. She is a time-based artist whose work, informed by contemporary portraiture, generally deals with issues of identity and vulnerability. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in French Literature from Université de Sherbrooke (2008) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Concordia University (2011).
I am interested in creating work that gives visibility to subjects I believe are under-represented or misrepresented in the media, such as elderly people. I explore the theme of identity by focusing on issues related to the ritualization of gender and gender performativity. My research generally deals with how women maintain a connection with their body as they age and how, through their everyday rituals, they continue to construct a feminine identity.
Through large-scale video installations and experimental films rooted in the new documentary approach, my current work focuses on the relationship elderly people have to their physical appearance, its maintenance and beauty rituals. By creating meditative atmospheres where daily routines and activities are examined, I create narratives that reveal the vulnerability of subjects who are coping with the loss of their identity.
THE WORK
in limbo, 2011
After visiting a community of elderly people in a rural Québec town every week for a period of about six months, I started creating narratives inspired by the lives of the people I encountered. Using them as actors, I made a short experimental film entitled in limbo. Set between reality and fiction, the film documents the movements of an elderly couple as they perform their very last dance. The original score was made using ambient sounds recorded in the dance hall where the couple is dancing. in limbo explores nostalgia, death and mourning.
EXPLORE
- The ways in which this work straddles reality and fiction;
- Sound and how it contributes to in limbo.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a performance artist who was born in China and now lives in Canada. She is interested in blurring the boundaries between the personal and the political, between private and public, art and life, and performance and everyday practice. Her current research focuses on how performance art practice addresses the everyday performativity of identity, and how strategic and essentialized performed identity redefines the interconnected notions of the public and private selves, gender, and power.
Life itself is a performance. I consider performance to be an attitude rather than a medium, an ideology rather than a style, and a situation rather than an action. In keeping with my interests in identity politics and postmodern feminism, I utilize my own body to explore ruptures in society. My performances deal primarily with deterritorialization and disessentialization by examining my personal and multifaceted struggles associated with identity, gender and sexuality.
THE WORK
The Husbands and I, 2011
My physical encounters with white males represent an ideological confrontation between me and a Western sociopolitical landscape to which I feel I don’t belong. By exploring these intimate encounters, I try to both reconfigure the established power that privileged white males embody, and question whether or not the culturally identified Chinese female body, both as foreign subject and object, can be invested and exploited.
EXPLORE
- The questions that this work raises about identity;
- The role that performance plays here in both forming and questioning identity.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Chun Hua Catherine Dong, web site: chunhuacatherinedong.wordpress.com
Amani, Golboo. Silent Hunter: Golboo Amani asks Chun Hua Catherine Dong about compliance and aggression in Husbands and I. Front Magazine Winter (2010/2011): 10-11. Baker, Cindy. Hourglass Figure. Visualeyez, 18 Sept. 2010. Web. 1 May 2012. http://www.visualeyez.org/2010/09/18/hourglass-figure/
Lithgow, Michael. 9 Amazing Political Art Projects of 2010. Art Threat Culuture + Politics, 19 Dec. 2010. Web. 1 May 2012. http://artthreat.net/2010/12/9-political-art-projects/
Nelson, Miranda. Performance artist Chun Hua Catherine Dong launches Granville Island arts protest. Straight.com, 8 Feb. 2010. Web. 1 May 2012. http://www.straight.com/article-286491/vancouver/performance-artist-chun-hua-catherine-dong-launches-granville-island-arts-protest
Joanne Joe Yan Hui is pursuing a Ph.D in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture program at Concordia University. Her research investigates concepts of identity in comic art, particularly the way in which graphic arts address culturally specific and historic conditions of migration and the transnational subject. Recent works include Shanghai Daily (2008), a graphic novel travel collage, and The Potato Wars: Chinese-Canadian Resistance during the Exclusion Era (2008), a comic poster selected for inclusion in the exhibition DIASPORArt: Strategy and Seduction of Canadian Artists from Different Cultural Communities in the Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank (2009-2010) displayed in the Ambassadors Room of Rideau Hall, the official residence of then- Governor General Michaëlle Jean. Hui’s current project, the graphic travelogue EXPO DAILY (2011-12), was presented at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and at Gendai Gallery.
My creative practice finds visual forms that complicate the popular and historic representations of culturally diverse communities, often pointing to fluid conditions of subjective experience and cultural production; hybridity, diaspora, and transnationalism are key terms to describe this condition. More specifically, I use print media and comic art to draw Chinese-Canadian historic moments of activism alongside a visual journal of current transnational communities in Canada and China.
THE WORK
Expo Daily, 2012
I spent two months in Shanghai performing ethnographic fieldwork at the 2010 World Exposition hosted by the city. Since my return, I have developed my initial material by blending fact (news cuttings) with ethnographic observation, literary theory and memoir writing to create a graphic travelogue of the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai. Very often, comical and pedagogical accounts are the result.
EXPLORE
- The idea of the travelogue and the ways in which it is realized through this work;
- The nature of the information that is communicated here via image and text.
jenna dawn maclellan was born in the prairies and raised in the community of Sioux Lookout (Ontario). She relocated to France, Chicago, Morocco and West Africa before becoming a Montréal-based artist. Location, accessibility and personal encounters have largely influenced her socially-engaged practice, with recent performative works including nord/sud and how to move a mountain. She is currently pursuing an Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University where she is a recipient of SSHRC funding.
maclellan seeks to set up and explore sites of exchange through performative, site-specific interventions aimed at giving, sharing and returning. Each of her works is intended as a gesture and an exercise in presence. This socially invested practice builds on simple technologies with appropriate materials to approach and reveal complex social narratives. With the desire to enable the impossible to become possible, she becomes the amateur, each time learning a new role and skill.
THE WORK
a study in greyscale, 2012
My current work attempts to grasp the concept of global trade and its effects locally, through imports and exports, with a particular attention given to Cuba’s current transitional state. Reflecting on the artist Martha Wilson’s comment, “We are living in a grey period,”* I attempt to understand the greyness surrounding globalization by seeking alternative means of exchange through public engagement.
*During her seminar Performance and Identity at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in January 2012, Martha Wilson was asked what an engaged artist should concentrate on today. Wilson replied that the answer was not clear, stating, “We are living in a grey period.” This statement reflects my recent work exploring this grey zone and how it applies to global exchange.
EXPLORE
- The kinds of questions that this work asks exchange and trade in Cuba;
- Working processes and the relationship that exists between artist and participants in this work.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Nimis, Erika. Dans ce monde on a besoin d’action, pas seulement de compassion. Africultures, Nov. 2010. Web. 1 May 2012. http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=9922
Pelletier, Sonia, ed. ATSA: Quand l’art passe à l’action / When Art Takes Action. Montréal: ATSA, 2008.
A San Francisco native, Wren Noble began her career working in film. After completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production at New York University she worked as a camera operator and then began working more extensively with still photography. In 2009, she became the producer of the New York-based non-profit Slideluck Potshow, traveling across North America and Europe to curate and produce photography shows. In late 2010, Noble moved to Montréal to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University and further develop her personal artistic practice.
My practice in both film and photography consists of environmental portraits that are often personal and intimate. Much of my work revolves around concepts of ageing and identity, and my own anxieties therein. Not quite documentary, my portraits are taken from within my subjective vision of the individuals and my relationship to them.
THE WORK
Madame, Monsieur, 2011
Madame Brunelle and Monsieur Allie met nine years ago when they moved into neighboring rooms at their assisted living residence. They began to dress identically as they went out on their daily walks around the neighborhood. As her memory and his vision fail they become increasingly like a unit, each one making up for the other’s diminished faculties. As their heights shrink, even their genders become ambiguous under suit jackets and ties. Their brightly colored satin and sequins mute the masculinity of the suits they wear as they decline the roles imposed by gendered couplehood in favor of a merged identity.
Through their colorful presentation they deny the invisibility that usually accompanies old age. The dominant cultural narrative of the elderly leaves little room for the preservation of individuality and independence. Their appearance, then, is a direct and deliberate assault on this slow fade to obscurity.
These images make visually manifest the increasing co-dependency and blurring of boundaries between individuals involved in intimate relationships into old age. They are a study in eccentricity and public presentation. They are also the result of my fruitful collaboration with these two individuals. Our interactions are an exchange of display and recognition. They allow me into the intimacy of their two-person routine as an observer and I give them a private audience in return.
EXPLORE
- The boundaries between observation and intimacy;
- Representations of gender, identity, and age in Madame, Monsieur.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Wren Noble, web site: wrennoblephotography.wordpress.com
James Whitman lives and works in Montréal, Québec. He mostly makes drawings and sometimes other things. Over the years he’s worked with such collaborators as 536, Jo Cook, Owen Plummer, The Cartoon Wars, Barry Doupé, and the Lions. He has exhibited in artist-run centres and galleries in Canada and abroad.
Barry Doupé is a filmmaker living in Vancouver. He is a member of The Lions collaborative drawing group, Jarry and Crazy Weapon. His films have been screened in Canada and internationally at venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Pleasure Dome and the Tate Modern.
We develop forms for long-term, open-ended, collaborative practice. These collaborations have the potential to develop considerably over time, and can last for years. We work to put things in motion, to preserve their fluidity and keep them unsettled. Everything can be deflated, can have its terms reversed and become its opposite. Anything is subject to a pratfall, to becoming small and harmless.
THE WORK
Adorno and Nose, 2011
Our interest is in the kinds of specific attention that happen when music is lifted out of the economies within which it is normally experienced.
EXPLORE
- The nature of collaboration;
- Tone and the role of performance in completing these works.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
The Lions, website: http://www.lionspile.ca/id_page.cfm
CBC. Bus Stop Sheet Music. North by Northwest. CBC Radio, British Columbia. 16 Sept. 2011. Web. 1 May 2012. http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/featured-guests/2011/09/16/bus-stop-sheet-music/
City of Vancouver. Adorno and Nose by Doupé and Whitman launches August 15. Celebrate Vancouver. Press release. 15 Aug. 2011. Web. 1 May 2012. http://www.celebratevancouver125.ca/2011/08/adorno-and-nose-by-doupe-and-whitman-launches-august-15/
Feyrer, Julia, and Pietro Sammarco, eds. Spoox Audiozine 8 (2011). 1 May 2012. http://www.spooxaudiozine.org/