Celia Perrin Sidarous
FOFA Gallery Image Grid
The FOFA Gallery is pleased to announce the inauguration of its 6th distinct exhibition space, the FOFA Gallery Image Grid.
Located on the west wall of the courtyard, a grid of hardware has been installed to allow us to feature large scale digital print works. While not unlike promotional banners associated with many cultural spaces, the Image Grid will offer the citizens of Montréal access to distinct works of art produced within the Concordia community, day and night. This is a new foray in Concordia’s effort to place public art at the core of Quartier Concordia and to assert the university’s active participation in the Ville Culturelle.
The first work chosen by director, jake moore, for presentation on the grid is, Vent, Arles, 2008, from the series, The Book Of Things, 2008-2013, by Celia Perrin Sidarous.
Vent, Arles, 2008, from the series, The Book Of Things, 2008-2013, Celia Perrin Sidarous
The work is a stunning interior that shows a curtain blowing into a room filled with images mounted on its walls. Placed on the exterior wall of the gallery, it suggests an opening allowing what is within, to become without. This delicate arc of fabric establishes the gesture of offering intended by the image grid and extends the architectural purposes and constraints of the gallery. We imagine the affect of the spectral wind as it enters into the private space that both illuminates and conceals the collected photographs within. We cannot see who or what is the subject of the photographs, though it matters not, for their framed presence alone triggers in each of us the potential to remember.
In her essay on the project, Tess Edmonson suggests the Book of Things “gives way to something about confusing cause with effect, something about dreaming away the difference between lying down and standing, and “something simple and magical,” as Borges defines eternity in Historia de la Eternidad, “an attempt at the simultaneity of the three tenses.” Borges credits nostalgia for providing humans the imagination to conceive of eternity. “In passion,” he writes, “memory inclines towards the intemporal. We gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image; the diversely red sunsets I watch every evening will in memory be a single sunset.” Although I am not one to dismiss Borges, I would disagree that eternity is a concept exclusive to retrospect. I am nostalgic for things as I am doing them, and for things I have not done yet. It is not only in memory but also in experience that what I do may be comparable to a single sunset.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CELIA PERRIN SIDAROUS is pursuing an MFA at Concordia University, Concentration Photography, and is currently on exchange at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo, Norway. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2013), The Banff Centre, Banff (2013), FOFA Gallery, Montreal (2012), WWTWO, Montreal (2012), VU, Centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie, Quebec City (2011), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2008) and The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal (2006). Her images have been published in periodicals in Canada and abroad, notably in Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, China and Italy. In 2010-2011 she was artist in residence at The Banff Centre and at the Art and Culture Centre Kolin Ryynänen in Koli, Finland. She is the recipient of several grants and awards including a SSHRC Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, an Emerging Artist Grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the 2011 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award. She lives and works in Montreal.
