Graduating Students’ Exhibition

Statement

The work Fibres is a drawing made with dry pastels and inspired by a Persian rug found in the artist's domestic space. The carpet’s colourful patterns are altered to dissolve into the drawing’s spatial plane, combining fragments of atrophied human bodies and botanical elements. With this work Fillion-Fecteau creates a symbolic space inspired by the cycles of life, speaking to contemplation, meditation, as well as sentiments of anguish and the discomforts of the human experience. Conceived to hang a few inches from the gallery wall, the work echoes the viewer’s body, whose movements in the gallery space modulate the delicate Japanese paper.

Website virginiefillion.com

Statement

In this self-portrait, Charlotte uses different symbols to evoke her perception of the relationships between different beings. According to her, all species are interconnected and can communicate and shapeshift into each other. The project is influenced by the teachings of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia: “To be born means to be nothing other than a reconfiguration, a metamorphosis of something else. That is to say, to be nature, means having to build, to build, one's own body from the Earth, from all the matter of the world available from this planet of which we are both the modification and the expression, articulation and fold.” All creatures on Earth are heirs to an ancient lineage, we are ultimately all related to each other.

Website charlotteghomeshi.com

Statement

These two projects reflect the situation of people born with two cultures that collide with each other. The artist herself, a Chinese person born in Canada, was exposed to the different values between two cultures and the struggle of being accepting by both. Fragments of the Origin includes many elements that represent the conflict inside of individuals born with two ethnicities. The sculpture Eat Herbs was made through the artist’s analysis of many delicate events such as discrimination and racism. It represents the stereotypes and judgments present through her personal development and the impact of cultural appropriation on her culture.

IG @j.he.art_  

Statement

Orise Jacques-Durocher's latest installation project Madeleine part travailler à l'atelier ou rentre à la maison en chantonnant initiates the use of a narrative approach, in which the artist envisions characters to whom she attributes the objects she puts in the foreground. The work reveals a familiar, domestic but liberated, discreetly utopian material world where the matter leaves us with uncertainties and reflections. This body of work also marks the beginning of Jacques-Durocher's use of a personal and experimental technique for reusing fired ceramics, in which she finely crushes finished ceramic pieces and incorporates them into the glazes on the surface of her work. This new approach brings attention to the contrasts between the precious and the modest, the delicate and the robust, the heavy and the light. These material explorations underscore the themes that animate the work such as the objectivity and subjectivity of utility, overproduction, the handmade, invisible work and domesticity. 

IG @0rise

Statement

The original footage for this work was taken in Saskatchewan in 2020. As Tong Zhou had never crossed Canada before, the idea of traveling the entire country was highly appealing to them, and so does the idea of traveling back to their native land. From China, To Canada raises the lack of knowledge about both their native and host country. With humbleness, it also raises the desire to take the time to deconstruct an idealized land in order to thoroughly understand it once reconstructed. Tong Zhou’s photo weavings are inspired by the semiotics of Chinese paintings and Chinese touristic objects. Knowing little about their Chinese heritage, they use the information available to them in Quebec and online to address this issue and make it more accessible to all.

Website tongzhoulafrance.com

IG @tongzhou.lafrance 

Statement

Tulipán deals with the symbolism of a very known flower, and that is not merely by chance. A tulip is one of the few flowers that at some point in its development, has only three petals. However, when it grows, it gives space to more petals to come and blossom together. Three women: three petals – and the possibility of more to come. Two screens to represent the characters that are alive, but the presence of a third personage coming through as in a surrealistic presence. The existence and co-existence of women. Women that collaborate, that are artists, that love each other – all types of love.

Websitesfilmfreeway.com/AnnaIunes | vimeo.com/annaiunes

IG @annaiunes

Acknowledgement

In the making of Tulipán, I tried my best to include people of multiple backgrounds. Being a Latina woman, I often find myself as being the only non-white person in a film set and I did not want to perpetuate that in my own practice. It was essential that I made sure that in every step of the production and post-production, people of different identities were part of it. I believe that the only way possible to tell a story where minorities are portrayed is to have a crew that reflects that diversity in the first place. It is with pride that I say that Tulipán had people from 16 different countries: Brazil, Canada, England, France, Haiti, Iran, Italy, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Syria, USA and Vietnam.

Statement

Calendar Boy and Calendar Hand address the artist's perception of the structure of time. In these works, the calendars act as traps which the figures cannot escape. For Menéndez, they become symbols of the structure of a capitalist society in which we perform. In Calendar Hand, the palm of the hand faces the viewer but hides behind the distorted fence with numbers. In Calendar Boy, the post-it note speaks about the artist’s expectations regarding their appearance as they socially and medically transition. To writes “no trans person looks the same” is to remember that there is no defined mold or linear path to being trans. Through the figure’s anxious but comical expression and treatment of the body, Menéndez keeps a sense of lightheartedness. Finally, the artist’s latest creation Coy Boy was made during their exploration with ceramics by using their sensibilities and interests from their painting and drawing practice.

IG @tu_patojx

Statement

OK's practice is dedicated to exploring the mediating mechanisms, both visible and invisible, that structure our means of communication and intersubjective exchange. Her work revolves entirely around this question: how to know what is real? How can we know anything for sure, being constantly inundated by privately and publicly funded streams of hollow, empty, splashy, expensive, clickable, narrative noise? How do we navigate these interfaces, and manage to locate each other? These works are about our relationship with reality, and how images fit into and expose the invisible network of connections in which we find ourselves entangled. As Kaja Silverman writes in The Miracle of Analogy (Or the History of Photography Part I): "Two is the smallest unit of being."

Website okpedersen.com 

IG @kristinapicture 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Chih-Chien Wang 

Statement

Roots Home is an interview-based documentary exploring Indigenous identity and relationship to the land. In it, the lines of the interviewee are intertwined with a poetic and touching visual story, intricately woven into one another. Roots Home won the prize for best student film at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

IG @Odrypluie

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Miriam Diana Pelletier for your collaboration and voice

Statement

Pathways through unknowing offers a series of multi-layer weave samples that explore the potentials of form and structure within a four-layer cloth. Woven layers stack on top of each other to create colorful tubes, pockets, and openings. The samples are displayed on a pegboard-like play table, supported by ceramic posts and arches. With these supports, the weavings stand, drape, fold, open, and twist in space. They can be arranged and rearranged within the table’s field of play. These samples emerge from research into the conceptual implications of something that is materially both binary and multiplicitous. Woven in multiple layers, weaving maintains its inherent binary nature but takes on a new physical dimensionality; from within this seemingly fixed structure, endless possibilities emerge. With their layers, pockets, and folds, the resulting weavings reject the false promise of binary thinking and offer new models of agency and relation.

Website ettasandry.com 

IG @ee_teetee_ay