Ready for Ignition!
Imagine the women chastised in archetypal fiction re-depicted as heroines. Or look at and listen to a traditional Eastern European flute to understand how it symbolizes immigrant experience. Then picture the photos of a father returning to South Korea after a decade’s absence.
These are some of the intriguing artworks that will be presented as part of Ignition at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. The ninth edition of this annual exhibition of work by graduate students from Concordia’s studio arts and humanities programs will be open from May 2 to June 8.
Michèle Thériault, the gallery’s director, invites a different co-curator every year to work on the exhibition with her. jake moore, FOFA Gallery’s director, gladly accepted this year’s invitation.
“What a pleasure to work together with Michèle and to be really involved in this process rather than merely respond to the outcome,” moore says.
“It’s difficult to select artworks because there’s so much more that should be shown, but after examining all the submissions, we could see what clearly reflected the school’s character and the ‘conversation’ among our students — the subject matter and methods they’re prioritizing,” she adds. “Ignition reflects the kind of ideas that students are grappling with.”
Curatorial assistant Zoë Chan notes that Ignition will explore a range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, video, and installation.
“The exhibition truly reflects how Concordia encourages students to work across disciplines,” she says.
“In Kaval, for example, Bogdan Stoica uses sculpture, photography, video, musical composition and has actually built a series of flutes to depict this metaphor for cultural identity and experience.”
Ignition also features Dayna Danger who has reincarnated femmes fatales as protagonists who embrace their sexuality in her photographic series Bad Girls. Meanwhile, David Butler has used Google Street View to retrace artist Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey text. Sandra Smirle makes the gaze the focal point in her video Outlook to consider the impact of mediated reality in an era of constant surveillance.
Jinyoung Kim posed her father against various backdrops in South Korea to hint at the intensity of her dad’s return visit to his native land. Andrea Szilasi has juxtaposed photographs of weight-training equipment with painted images from Western art history books to highlight the unexpected differences in aesthetics and form. And Véronique Chagnon-Côté paints lush gardens and foliage to draw attention to people’s desire to control and contain the natural world.
Eugénie Cliche has created ‘photobroderies’ by turning family photos into embroidery canvases, while Rosika Desnoyers presents her exploration of needlepoint work in 19th-century Berlin.
“It’s the second year that students in Concordia’s humanities PhD program have been invited to make submissions, and Desnoyers’s project draws directly on her doctoral research,” says Marina Polosa, the Ellen Art Gallery’s education and public programs coordinator.
The gallery, in the J.W. McConnell Library Building (Room LB-165, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.), is open from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday.
Related links:
• Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery
• Department of Studio Arts
• Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies
• Faculty of Fine Arts
• FOFA Gallery
• Humanities PhD program