SET OFFgraduate cata log:

pr in t media d iv i s ion 2013

SET OFFgraduate cata log:

pr in t media d iv i s ion 2013

“DO YOU SENSE HOW ALL THE PARTS OF A GOOD PICTURE ARE INVOLVED WITH EACH OTHER, NOT JUST PLACED SIDE BY SIDE? ART IS A CREATION FOR THE EYE AND CAN ONLY BE HINTED AT WITH WORDS” – from What is Painting (1966-68) John Baldessari

In his piece, What is Painting (1966-68), John Baldessari pokes at the modern notion that an idea can be art. Drawing from instructional manuals, he implies that traditional making or viewing doesn’t serve the (then) contemporary proliferation of performative and conceptual works. That self-reflextive and playful mode of art production wasn’t new, and many artists continue to consciously locate themselves with an eye to the critical past in relation to their practice.

The artists in this survey are all engaged in the process of understanding that relationship to making; perhaps the legacy of artists like Baldessari and Duchamp lies in the awareness new artists have of their complicity in the evolving definition of art. The absurd paradox of Baldessari’s saying, “a word can’t substitute for an image, but is equal to it,” is that it is true, then false, then true again.

Whether looking for a greater underrstanding of the opacity and transparency of formal and conceptual relationships, delving into a dialogue between self and spaces, or exploring the shift of perspective between text and image, these artists are deeply involved with the evolving exchange between their practice and the viewer. Even if the viewer is the artist’s self, it is through that relationship that we achieve a sense of the greater implications of our creative endeavors.

I would like to thank all the artists for participating in this catalog and for the assistance of Christine Garvey and the design work of Elliott Rajnovic.

Erika Adams

Assistant Professor of ArtPrint MediaConcordia UniversityMarch 2013

Butterfly wings, mushroom spores, spider webs and deer carcasses are but a few of the unexpected materials that define the artwork of Alexis Williams. Needless to say, such acts as scavenging, foraging, and collecting are all fundamental strategies that the artist employs. Roaming from east coast tides to Alaskan highways in search of new creative measures, the rhizomatic momentum is indicative of the sense of quest inherent to this artist’s practice. Sites of engagement range across a spectrum as broad as virgin forests, trance dance floors, and science laboratories. By means of such endeavors, Williams weaves a web that binds the artifacts of ephemeral traces to compose fugitive archives.

f iona ann i s on : ALEXIS WILLIAMS

jacque l in he icher t on : JEANETTE JOHNS

In her work, Jeanette Johns transforms antiquated, standardized and objective con-cepts and makes them highly personal and relative through the act of isolation, transformation and replication. In this way universal concepts such as distance or time become intensely relative, distance becomes measured by years of muscle memory and time becomes measured in terms of the slow incremental shifting of the earth’s plates.

In Johns work we, the viewer, obtain a privileged perspective in that we are placed either above or below regular sightlines and the elusive experience of observation is rendered into order through patterning and perspectival illusion. The viewpoints that Johns work occupies acknowledge and challenge canonical beauty as well as over-arching concepts and knowledge systems that structure our everyday experiences. In Johns work the gap between empirical standard and experience is highlighted, and the intricacies of our conceptions of the observed world are brought to the infinite edge of a horizon line.

Printing and sculpting are often actions at the center of Hideki’s unscripted perfor-mances displaying the intimate relationships between the artist, his tools and the objects of his creation. “The work I get good feedback on is work that I do without a plan.” His unpretentious performance work often begins with a visceral process, reminiscent of insect behavior, that develops into spontaneous and genuine actions. He executes uncomfortable tasks that put him in states of submission, similar to ceremonial prostra-tions, his body bound by self-imposed rules that increases the challenge of an unfa-miliar task. The viewer’s empathy with the awkward and painstaking efforts creates a tension and frustration towards the emerging paradox: interfering in an attempt to relieve the artist’s struggle would in fact be counterproductive in elevating his dignity. We are left to contemplate and relate to the desire to do things the hard way.

a lex i s w i l l iams on : HIDEKI KAWASHIMA

Aanchal Malhotra explores the world of multidimensionality in an effort to capture in image and text the ephemeral and banal feelings circulating around us. Inspired by a lifetime of contact with the physicality of text – Aanchal belongs to one of Delhi’s oldest bookseller families - her work engages with the malleability of language as a system of meaning that both represents and shrouds multiple dimensions of reality. In her most recent work, Je suis triste aujourd’hui, she turns inwards to focus on the process of producing text, on the intimate practice of writing as a daily exercise of reflection and remembering, as a path to unearthing the yearning behind words. She opens up a world of possibility in her view of language as a vehicle to explore the depth of her own experience, the hybridity of her diasporic journey, and the shallowest layers of the mundane.

lorenzo vargas on : AANCHAL MALHOTRA

The daily commute is a playground for the daydreamer. In ‘terra cognita’ Natalie Draz shares these passing dreams. Small buildings are sheltered by a prone body, a paper simulacrum of the artist herself. Among and within are tiny books holding poetry captured on Montreal’s Metro. Transparent arms reach down, words tattooed in thread on woven skin. These are then projected floating on the floor guarded by a glowing curtain of buildings. Cities have been many things in Draz’s work: hungry monsters, symbiotic and parasitic inhabitants of the human body, a flock of creatures to curl up with. Now they become the neurons and pathways of memory, externally carrying her fleeting thoughts and visions. Narrative tries desperately to connect, but the arms never touch the dreamer or lay claim to the pages below. What is left is disconnected words, frozen seconds building a fragmented whole. It is the rare opportunity to visit the streets of unconscious remembrance.

SHE DREAMS THE C ITY madela ine lyons cooper on : NATALIE DRAZ

Through a mixture of spilled ink and sinuous networks of fur, appendages and talons, Christine Garvey’s mixed media, paper-based sculptures exude, in texture and form, a surrealistic naturalism that speaks to her interest in transformation and survival. Though bits of natural creatures catch the eye – in Pink Becoming (2012), for example, woodblock prints of tentacles and fur wind around feather-like splatters of black ink – these fragments are interwoven between and across abstracted, painterly components that interrupt the interpretation of Garvey’s work as totally animal. In creating such amalgams of form, Garvey takes an experimental, organic approach by producing constituent parts that are then assembled in-situ. Woodblock-printed, laser-cut and painted swaths of mylar are layered, draped and sliced to produce three dimensional sculptures that are displayed in nebulous forms on the wall. This evolutionary pro-cess mimics the process of becoming to which Garvey refers in her work: dependent, contingent and inevitable.

mar i s sa neave on: CHRISTINE GARVEY

With her project Sanguine/Terre Brulée, Maryse Arseneault seeks to address continued disregard for the presence and cultural contributions of the First Nations people on “Acadian territory”. The installation’s eight-pointed star – which crowds the gallery’s floor, controlling movement through the gallery space – can be found on traditional blankets and crafts in both Mi’kmaq and Acadian homes. Here it is meant to function as an entry point for the discussion of a shared history, often untold.

With silkscreen and digital print-making, Arsenault has both masked and adorned these nineteenth century portraits of American Aboriginals: interrupting any conventional ‘reading’ of these photographs and disrupting the discourse of ‘discovery’ they have been used to support. Arsenault’s exhibition hopes to function as a venue for conversation, contemplation, and respectful discussion of not only the shared past, but also the shared present and the shared future of First Nations and non-first-nations people – in New Brunswick and in Canada, at large.

soph ia bar tho lomew on: MARYSE ARSENEAULT

Jennifer Lupien folds space. The space around us that is often overlooked, the space in between things, the temporary, the forgotten, and the fleeting. At the crossroads of applied and fine arts, her installations unite print media, found photographs, paper engineering and sculpture to present an exploration of our surroundings.

Much of her work evolves from spontaneous discoveries that refer back to an absent subject’s history and memory: collections of photographs found whilst rummaging in an alley outside her house, drips of paint left on studio floors, and other peculiarities that generally go unnoticed within the urban landscape. In her hands, even of the simplest material, a white sheet of paper, is transformed, modulated, assembled and rearranged to present another dimension that allows us to see anew.

Undoubtedly, Jennifer’s interventions flow between documentation and transformation and demonstrate a seemingly endless endeavour to highlight the fleeting moments and discreet surroundings that witness and preserve our passage through time and space.

mar ie -m iche l le deschamps on : JENNIFER LUPIEN

W: Let’s jump!

G: No, let’s rather not.

W: Come on, it will be so much fun!

G: It would be dangerous. We would break ourselves.

W: No we won’t, are you kidding me? We are finally going to be free!

G: We would be not grounded anymore, and who knows how we would touch-down again.

W: We get to experience ourselves in the floating inbetweenness, not boundedby gravity anymore!

G: We would not only risk a disconnection from each other, but maybe a total disintegration from ourselves. I don’t want to commit suicide.

W: If we are always going to worry about maintaining our boundaries, we will never be able to undo ourselves and experience our potential for being who we could be!

G: It’s easy for you, you have nothing to be afraid of. No commitments, no responsibilities. You just adjust yourself to whatever situation, but those times are gone, when you could just flow wherever you wanted. We belong to each other now!

W: There is no such thing as you and me, therefore we can’t belong to each other. We are the same.

G: Oh really?! And what is the proof of that?

W: That we are jumping.

!

THE GLASS OF WATER WAS DREAMING OF A TRAMPOL INE AN EVEN ING OF A SMALL D ISASTER csenge ko lozsvar i on :ELLIOTT RAJNOVIC

ALEXIS WILLIAMS

JEANETTE JOHNS

HIDEKI KAWASHIMA

AANCHAL MALHOTRA

OFF SET : INDEX

THRUSH 2012 direct Print of Thrush on Nepali paper 22 x 30 in

ROAD KILL LEPIDOPTERY 2012butterfly dust on cotton 19 x 19 in

DRAINSPOTTING 2012graphite rubbing of man hole covers 42 x 42 in

DHARMA (BLEED) 2011 digitally manipulated macro photo of chanterelle mushroom 22 x 30 inches

WEATHER DRAWING (NOV 27), 2012 gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, ink, 9 x 12 in

CONSIDERED VIEWS 2012 screen-print on inkjet, 26 in x 19 in

CONSIDERED VIEWS (DETAIL)2012 screen-print on inkjet, 26 x 19 in

EXTINCTION2012performance

ROLL UP (ROLL BACK) OR WORKING ON A LINE 40 METERS LONG2012leftover of the performance

ROLL UP (ROLL BACK) OR WORKING ON A LINE 40 METERS LONG 2012performance

PRE-OCCUPATION WITH RECOLLECTION accordion book + box, handmade paper, poetry, letterpress- approx 50”

NOVEMBER 20, 2012 typewriter, text 8.5” x 11”

STUDIO (BLEED)2013 digital photography

NATALIE DRAZ

CHRISTINE GARVEY

MARYSE ARSENEAULT

JENNIFER LUPIEN

ELLIOTT RAJNOVIC

PINK BECOMING 2012Woodcut and acrylic ink on mylar (72” X 46” X 5”)

BLACK EMBRACE 2013Woodcut on paper and mylar(45” X 35” X 3”)

TERRA COGNITA 2012

installation of pigment print with folded paper architecture96 x 36 in

SNAKESKINS2012photo-lithography on organza with embroidered text6 x 30 in (each arm)

DARK CITY2012screenprint on organza26 x 96 in (each panel)

SANGUINE, TERRE BRULÉES ET AUTRES ANGOISSES 2011-2013 screen print on digital prints

(900 peace offerings) 4 x 6 in each

UNTITLEDStudio shot, 2013

UNTITLED 2013work in progress, con-structed digital print, variable dimensions

UNTITLED (BLEED)2012work in progress, constructed paper, wall installation, variable dimensions

TRAMPOLINE WORK2013 digital photograph

HIDEKI KAWASHIMAI work to recollect - thoughts, memories, emotions or feelings. I embody my recollection in my performances. I transfer the embodiment in my prints. I work to examine the relations between the body and our subjectivity in order to define our existence in the present moment of being.

NATALIE DRAZInvestigating the structures of books, maps and anatomical studies as sources of alternative documentation, storytelling and autobiography, Natalie immerses the viewer in her personal-ized worldview, accessed via visual narrative strategies of pop-up books, installations, and intimate moments of discovery and transformation through personal micro-narratives and sketches.

JENNIFER LUPIENJennifer Lupien is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. Born in 1983 in Abitibi, northern Qc she moved to Montreal in the 2000 to study theatre & visual arts. She completed a bach-elor’s degree in Studio Art in 2009 and is now a Print Meda MFA candidate in at Con-cordia University. Active in the artist run centre world, her work has been shown around Mon-treal as part of many collective exhibitions.

MARYSE ARSENEAULTBased in Moncton/Montreal, I am from Acadian descent, with a Mi’kmaq/Scottish/Breton bloodline. My current practice examines matter’s mnemonic potential and the ancestral imprint. Questioning the role of rituals in society, my work investigates the practical and spiritual nature of art. This project was brought to you in part by ArtsNB.

CHRISTINE GARVEYOriginally from New York and currently based in Montreal, Christine Garvey works in print, collage, and mixed media installation. She enjoys croissants, collaborations, and the soulful tunes of D’angelo.

JEANETTE JOHNSJeanette Johns is an artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who is currently pursuing her MFA at Concordia University in Montréal Québec. Her artwork is rooted in the act of observation and the experience of looking, particularly as it has to do with representations of place and the subject of landscape, considering intersections with the two-dimensional attributes of mathematics, patterning and geometry.

ALEXIS WILLIAMS(A.K.A Ember Erebus) is a Canadian artist working mainly in video and print whose work often high-lights the kinship of Art, Science and Spirituality.

AANCHAL MALHOTRAMauris placerat adipiscing nisi, vitae dictum magna fringilla ut. Sed pulvinar mauris ac felis tincidunt nec viverra nisi dignissim.

ELLIOTT RAJNOVICis trying to think about it all, but this time in a different way. This time, in a way that is less about this or that, but maybe more about this/that, and/or yes instead of no.