Ignition at Ellen Art Gallery
Ignition is an annual exhibition that features recent work by graduate students enrolled in Concordia’s Studio Arts program.
This exhibition provides an up-and-coming generation of artists with a unique opportunity to present ambitious, interdisciplinary works. This year, Ignition features seven artists whose practices include print media, photography, audio and video installation. The work was selected by independent curator Alissa Firth-Eagland and Michèle Thériault, director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
Chris Boyne explores the complexity of memory, identity and place in his work titled blueberry hill. His combination of still images, text and film reflects the sentiment of storytelling and its relationship to his Nova Scotia roots.
Simon Brown’s practice as an artist and writer involves subtle conceptual works that often infiltrate public media formats such as radio or newspaper want ads. This piece is based on Michèle Lalonde’s famous 1968 poem Speak White.
Jennifer Cherniack’s work plays with the authority of the art historical canon by injecting it with her own personal narrative. The History of Art According to My Archives lists hundreds of potential subjects of inquiry based on the artist’s own experience in the art world. In her second installation, I’m Sorry, Jackson, the artist mythologizes her past connection to Jackson Pollock’s work, and its imagined effect on the course of art history.
Karen Kraven is interested in how hand-made, provisional architecture can affect people’s perception of reality. Her sculptural installation This Is a Place to Wait out the Rain, works with sound and optical illusion to create a space of tension and uncertainty.
Étienne Tremblay-Tardif‘s installation titled Archéologie de l’échangeur Turcot : journal de recherche imprimé, presents his ongoing research into Montreal’s infamous Turcot Interchange, symbol of Montreal’s Modernist urban renewal of the 1960s. Through a confluence of prints, videos, artifacts, publications and found objects from the interchange site, the viewer is invited to confront the multiple layers of its historical evolution, its current state of degradation, and the controversial plans for its renewal.
Brian Virostek presents a dual video projection titled Reflecting Them and Their Icons Together in Waves, The Only Place Where the Lights Have Not Gone Out. Images and sounds gathered along a river as it cuts through the city reveal people’s connection to it through myth, pollution, leisure and urban development.
SONAR, by Sandra Volny, is an audio visual portrait of the Harting family, a group of blind siblings who regularly busk in Montreal’s metro stations. Through a series of interviews and performances, SONAR weaves a poetic and sensitive discourse on the meeting of voice and the act of listening in a resonant space.
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 technical support.
When: May 5 to June 11, 2011. Opening: Wednesday, May 4, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, ground floor, J.W. McConnell Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.).
For general information: 514-848-2424, ext. 4750. Free admission. Wheelchair accessible.
Related links :
• Department of Studio Arts
• Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
• View the event on Facebook