The 19th edition of IGNITION features nine artists from Concordia’s Studio Arts and Humanities graduate programs whose works bear traces of lived realities and feelings of loss and longing. Drawing from personal and collective memories, they resort to multilayered processes and narratives to document, sift and weigh the relationships that anchor them to their surroundings.

A group of works explore visceral, embodied experiences obliquely through hybrid, abstracted and fragmented forms. Zahra Hosseini’s cyanotypes reimagine the artist’s own body through fractal deconstruction, capturing her experience of living with impairment. Made by pressing her oil-coated skin onto the paper, Goddess Figures (2023-2024) depicts a series of otherworldly beings with disjointed limbs bound together by the prints’ deep blue background. Involving a process of layering acrylic paint and printing techniques, Colin Canary’s paintings question the vaporous nature of memory. Family archives, grainy photographs he shoots on digital camera, and found imagery are transferred onto the picture plane creating repetitive, abstract and vaguely familiar motifs. The eerie quality of the works brings to mind a wistful presence beyond the murky surface. Similarly evocative, Elisabeth Perrault’s Ces géants qui se nourissent de soleil (2023-2024) is a ceramic installation consisting of five towering sunflowers. Usually recognized for its sturdiness and majestic proportions, the plant is shown here in a withered and devastated state. Voluntarily broken and depleted, Perrault’s fragilized flowers point to the necessity for vulnerability, impermanence, and regeneration.

Artists Nina Vroemen, Rebecca Ramsey and Andrés Salas open a reflection on the permeability and porosity of bodies, systems, and landscapes. In their mixed-media installation Lessen in Time (2023), Vroemen draws on personal history, research, fiction, and material inquiry to grapple with the unsettling world of nuclear waste and its management. Using low-fired permeable porcelain as a vessel, they imaginatively experiment with iodine, a substance essential to thyroid health and which, when consumed during a nuclear event, can temporarily block radioactive contamination. Ramsey meditates on the historical use of ceramic materials in spaces dedicated to sanitation, hygiene, and water supply, and the ways in which we interact with these environments on a daily basis. Her sculptures trace parallels between the circulatory and waste management systems of buildings and those of the body. Blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, container and contents, they remind us of the porous and leaky nature of our bodies. Silenciosa, Silenciada [Silenced, Silent] (2023) is a video essay and installation by Salas documenting his family farm in Cachipay, Colombia, and its transition from coffee farm to monocropping for floral foliage, which is less susceptible to pests. The artist interweaves the story of his grandfather, who succumbed to Chagas disease, an infection transmitted by an insect colloquially known as the ‘kissing bug.’ Salas chronicles the environmental disruption he has seen in the region during his lifetime and its frontline victims, those who work the land.

Artist Ayodele Mzilikazi similarly brings attention to the changes occurring in the place where he grew up and continues to live today in Exploring the HEIGHTS (2016-). This ongoing photographic series documents his rapidly changing neighbourhood of LaSalle Heights in the southwest of the island of Montreal. The residential zone is historically known for its diverse immigrant population, vast green spaces, tight-knit community, and affordable housing projects. In an effort to capture the idiosyncrasies of this place before the levers of gentrification fully reshape it, Mzilikazi captures the moments of joy, rest and mundanity that make up its social fabric.

Borrowing from ancestral West African weaving and hair threading techniques, Ifeoma U. Anyaeji uses yarns made from plastic bags and other discarded materials to make vibrant sculptures that honour her Igbo ethnic heritage. Her latest piece reinterprets the ceremonial rite of the King of Masquerades in Igboland, a male-dominated ritual which she infuses with traditionally feminine craft skills and ecological awareness. Reminiscent of gargoyles adorning cathedrals, the Diablitos (2024), or little devil figurines, found on each of Armando Cuspinera’s 100 volcanic ash-glazed tiles reflect upon the dissemination of religious or pagan imagery across cultures and territories. Lining them consecutively on the wall in a mosaic-like pattern, Cuspinera emphasises the gradual erosion and transformation of the symbolic or cultural significance of this motif as it undergoes displacement and finds new uses.

Deeply introspective, the works gathered in this exhibition consider our current moment by combing through different layers of time, histories, and traditions. The artists envision the world anew as they grapple with a multifaceted sense of loss and grief, favouring malleable and provisional materials that allow them to find their way through often unwelcoming terrains.

– Mojeanne Behzadi and Julia Eilers Smith