Fine Arts Reading Room
Please whisper (like the wind in the trees)
March 4 - April 12, 2024
Vernissage : March 21st, 2024, 5 pm to 8 pm
Courtesy of the FARR
Reading room description
Please whisper (like the wind in the trees) is a selection of texts, zines, and artist books selected by the staff librarians at Concordia’s student-run arts library.
In response to the works Mountain Song by Steven J. Yazzie and Electric Water by Nancy Barić, the library staff has created an offering of resources that reflect themes of ecology, decoloniality, flow, movement, and the poetics of water.
This selection carefully highlights Indigenous artists and knowledge keepers and offers space to reflect on readers’ own relationships with land. Within the FOFA Gallery’s Black Box, the Fine Arts Reading Room extends its collection to create a micro-reading room for learning and storytelling, where visitors are invited to immerse themselves in an environment of calm recollection and expansion. The inclusion of ephemera and objects left behind in the library pays homage to the continuity of space and the specialness of unique histories held within artifacts. We invite you to explore, to linger, to exist, to critique and to wonder within these walls in quiet togetherness, to take time in this space to co-exist with our collection.
About FARR
The Fine Arts Reading Room is a student-run art library and resource centre located on the second floor of Concordia’s EV building. During opening hours, we offer access to resources including computers, printing, reference help, and loans from our collection of historical and contemporary art publications. Throughout the year, we run a number of projects designed to support student artists, such as workshops, lecture series, as well as annual projects such as funded research residencies, and publication grants.
Visit FARR's Instagram!
Librarians' biographies
Ranime El Morry
Ranime El Morry (she/her) is an Egyptian artist completing her BFA in Studio Art. Her work is often a fusion of comfort and uneasiness, drawing on the sceneries taking place in the void inside of her head, and latching onto the fleeting feelings that have an impact on her psyche. Her main interests revolve around community/isolation, identity, music, and process. She aims for connection between the audience and their work, light or intense, to bring a wave of familiarity and to push the viewer into introspection.
Elena Martin
Elena Martin (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and researcher whose work addresses themes relating to speculative futures, fantasy, storytelling, memory, and illness. They craft imaginary realms that centre love, care, compassion, creativity, and generosity, and posit that their dreams aren’t unattainable or unrealistic. They combine their visions with explorations into historical archives that contest fabricated narratives and decenter heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism. Currently, they are completing a BFA in Art Education.
Ev Ricky
Ev Ricky (they/them, xe/xyr) is a disabled and TME trans cultural worker, visual artist, writer, white settler and dyke. They are interested in the immune system, third space theory, comics, Medieval art, kinetic sculpture, the supernatural, and access intimacies. Xyr work centres imaginative flight, humour, and astonishment as critical strategies, and is rooted in play and fun exhaustion. You can follow their work at evricky.com or @ev.r_icky.
Aly Turgeon
Aly Turgeon (he/they) is a queer, interdisciplinary dance artist from amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, AB), currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, QC). Aly is a contemporary dance student at Concordia University, where he has focused on deepening his approach to generating and staging choreographic work. Their work mainly investigates questions of humanity and language, centering queer identity and experience, and exposing complexities within community and interpersonal relationships. Aly is passionately invested in the intersections that exist between visual art media and performance art. His process involves prompt/free writing and drawing, collage, graphic design, installation, and multimedia animation. Aly's recent dance film, PERMISSIONTODREAM? was presented in July 2023 as part of the REELING: Dance on Screen Festival at Mile Zero Dance (Edmonton). He will be debuting a collaborative choreographic work in the Art Matters Festival (Montréal) in March 2024.
India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner
India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner is a Black bi-racial artist, writer, curator, and cultural worker from Montréal. She is currently completing her BFA in Art History and Studio Arts at Concordia University. India-Lynn was a facilitator/curator for the 2022 Art Matters Festival. Her work has been shown at Fais-moi l'art gallery in the co-curated exhibition Tenderly Reminiscing (May 2023). She was the Artistic and Community Alliances Coordinator at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in 2022, producing the digital publication [espace variable | placeholder].
