Concordia artists making headlines

Adad Hannah’s public art pieces are familiar sights to many Montrealers.

These include the limestone Blocks for the Musée on the sidewalk surrounding the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, commissioned by the City of Montreal, and LEAP, whose gigantic, kinetic figures appear on the glass exterior of the PERFORM Centre on the Loyola Campus.

As Hannah explained when LEAP was unveiled in 2010: “For this project, I drew on my research into Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human motion.”

Based in Montreal and Vancouver, Hannah is also renowned for his photo and video installations, many of which are tableaux vivants of historical events or iconic artworks that he restages, re-enacts and subtly reinvents with present-day context and meaning.

One example is the multimedia installation Three Generations (Kodiak Art Club, 1953) (2014) at Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts, a layered glimpse of a moment in Hannah’s family narrative.

Inspired by a photo of his grandmother painting a picture of his mom on an Alaskan military base, this image, its re-enactment, and new and archival materials — including photo, video, audio, collage, set design, interviews and recorded performance — delved into the notion of the family portrait, while enlisting his mother as collaborator.

In Prince George, B.C., with the support of Two Rivers Gallery, Hannah recreated a historical hotel ballroom that was destroyed by fire in 1914. Virginia Hall (2014), the name of both the ballroom and Hannah’s work, found new life in this series of evocative photo and video tableaux of a fictional costume party.

The exhibition included the constructed set on which these tableaux were filmed and, like much of his work, featured “real people” instead of actors.

Hannah recently travelled to St-Louis, Senegal, to work on a new project based on Théodore Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819).

This isn’t Hannah’s first dance with Medusa; in 2008, he staged a tableau vivant of the painting in the B.C. community of 100 Mile House.

Born in New York City and raised in Israel and England, this award-winning artist’s work can be found in museums and galleries throughout the world.

Can walking be art? During her 2015 residency in Seydisfjördur, Iceland, the photographer and visual artist who teaches in Concordia’s Department of Photography walked. And walked. And walked some more.

“Taking the opportunity to focus on walking as an artistic activity, I wandered around every day on foot within the limits of the short daylight hours,” writes Auer in her online statement about this work.

“Recalling light and darkness as the fundamental basis of photography, my goal is to extend my photographic process and personal experience of landscape to convey — both inwardly and outwardly — a time and place of transition.”

The resulting photo and video work, January, was recently shown at Montreal’s Patrick Mikhail Gallery. Auer explains in her biography that cultural sites “focusing on themes that connect history, place, journey and cultural experience” are parts of her many journeys, which include the Leighton Artist’s Colony at the Banff Centre in Alberta and residencies in Sweden and Alaska.

Auer’s photography book Unmarked Sites (2011) interprets Newfoundland and Labrador’s landscape as a holder of history, identity and mythology. She’s also exhibited at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture and Musée des Beaux Arts du Québec, as well as in Switzerland, Sweden and elsewhere.

Since 2000, the collaborative work of multidisciplinary visual artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau has delved into dance, music, photography, installation, video and sculpture — to acclaim from both alternative and mainstream cultural scenes.

They were, for instance, founding members of the popular band AIDS Wolf, while their artwork is collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Lum and Desranleau have also exhibited at the Confederation Centre for the Arts Gallery in Charlottetown, P.E.I.; the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago; and the Kiehle Gallery at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, where the duo collaborated with Minneapolis dance group Body Cartography Project.

In addition to being part of their process, they write in their artist bio, collaboration is a theme within their work “with each other, with other artists, and between their materials.”

Lum and Desranleau’s work, they continue, “focuses on the lifespan of material; how material stresses cause fading, scuffing, peeling, crumpling or crushing, and, how these reactions can be said to animate the materials.”

Recent works include a dance/installation project presented at Théâtre La Licorne in Montreal in June as part of the OFFTA Live Art Festival. A collaboration with dancer/choreographer Sarah Wendt, this 25-minute piece also featured Karen Fennell, BFA 07, who danced, and Dominique Alexander, BFA 11, who composed the original score.

Represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, some of Lum and Desranleau’s recent work was part of the Papier16 art fair in April 2016.

Yannick Desranleau recently received a 2016 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, valued at $60,500 over two years.