RESURFACING VISA 4F06 Honours Exhibition Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts Brock University
Image: Students documenting their work in the drawing studio at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts. Photo by Gillian Minaker. Cover image: St-Aubin, Charelle, Grand-maman, 2022. Polaroid Emulsion on Mylar, 10.16cm x 10.16cm.
Acknowledgements I want to thank the Chair of Visual Arts (VISA), Amy Friend, for her support and guidance during the pandemic. I would like to thank all departments at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts (MIWSFPA) for working together to support our students with studio space. It is a testament to how the various departments within the MIWSFPA pull together in a time of need. I also offer a welcome and thank you to our new Associate Dean Linda Carreiro for her overall support. In 2021, Niagara Artists Centre (NAC) invited our graduates to exhibit in their space. The relationship built over the years between Brock University and NAC has allowed numerous graduates to showcase their work, and they continue to do this with enthusiasm. For over 50 years, NAC has been a professional gallery that reinvigorates our city and brings together creative practitioners, from theatre professionals to visual artists and musicians. Stephen Remus and Natasha Pedros provided the help we needed, and we are forever grateful to all involved. A special thank you goes to curator Shannon Anderson, who helped guide the students to their final exhibition, fostering learning with great care as she met with the students. Nurtured by their instruction in the 3F99 Honours Tutorial course taught by Associate Professor Donna Szoke in their final year, the students are able to articulate how their practice connects to contemporary theory. These critical engagements strengthen intellectual rigour and give students the confidence they need to speak about their work. Designed by MIWSFPA Graphic Designer Gilgun Doran, this catalogue boasts of the quality and range of our student’s abilities. Most of the photographs taken for this catalogue were by student Julie Luth, who worked tirelessly during the photo shoot to ensure the student’s work was properly represented. It was also at this time that we were able to take advantage of the fantastic technical abilities of our staff; both Arnie McBay and Max Holten-Andersen were there from the start. Finally, Visual Arts Gallery Coordinator Sonya de Lazzer did an incredible job organizing the MIWSFPA space for the exhibition. Preparator Matthew Caldwell was also essential in making sure the installation of the work at both the NAC and the MIWSFPA gallery was a great success. Troy David Ouellette Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
RESURFACING Learning and Mentorship This year we celebrate the 4th year honours students of Spring 2022 at Brock University. During both semesters, the students of 4F06 forged many connections—chief among these were the speakers who met to share their experiences as practitioners, scholars, and teachers. These guest artists included: Monica van Asperen, who spoke on a wide range of topics from First Nations to the community of artists in Argentina; Tyler Durbano, who talked about various projects related to identity and gender (through the medium of hair); Risa Horowitz, who communicated the importance of resilience and detailed her practice in the act of making things; and Dianne Bos, who provided a survey of her work, which has spanned decades. All of these artists/mentors were selected for how their work related to each student’s practice, and how it expanded on our discussions of the dominant themes highlighted in the class. In their first semester, the students participated in an excursion to Toronto to see the vibrant exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). At the AGO, Julie Crooks’ curated exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory allowed the students to encounter narratives expressed through historical and contemporary artists working within the Caribbean Diaspora. Concurrently the show entitled GTA21 at MOCA featured 21 artists and collectives working with large-scale installations that celebrated critique, storytelling, and making. The docents, curators and volunteers at both venues made the trip informative and enjoyable, as did our nimble bus driver Barry, whom we lovingly called “Barry Allen” (the Flash) because of his curious ability to get us to our destinations on time.
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The Exhibition The works in this final exhibition represent a milestone for the students of 4F06. The unveiling of these works results from two semesters of research and practice that shows the range of material interests, from acrylic painting to natural dyes and inks to handmade paper, wood carving, textiles, and methods of wet-process photography. In each case, the mediums chosen by each student mirrored equally diverse concepts. Together these pairings generated potent forms of engagement by finding a home within social history, diversity, and numerous working methods. Moreover, these material processes used by the students often collided with mass fabrication within a globalized world of capitalized post-Fordist labour. As a result, handmade practices have resurfaced within the post-industrial economy context and are reborn as a testament to how each artist connects with material production. For instance, Naomi Egbunike’s paintings and drawings focus on braided hair politics and allow insights into the sensitive nature of her experience as a settler of African descent. In these works, we glimpse her formative years in Nigeria, where elements of the environment fuse with cultural expressions. As she indicates in her statement, “I continue to be fascinated by these comparisons, and this project revolves around all the possible ways I can blur the line between Black women, Nigerian culture, and nature—both conceptually and literally—to create a mesmerizing whole.” In many of her works, hair transforms into tree roots (or vice versa), and the very concept of these entanglements sets the stage for thinking about our place among traditions, rituals, and political engagements. The methodical act of braiding and thinking, as a process, allows a conceptual leap where the act of making is an act of caring, where cultural roots become hair roots become plant roots. We can also see many associations to African American Artist Sonya Clark’s braided hair works, where even the act of hairdressing is akin to textile art and proficiency in weaving. Hairstyling also makes reference to hair salons and barber shops, where topics of the day are discussed at length as processes of social exchange, just as exhibition venues set up public discussions and promote dialogue.1
It’s important to note how hairdressers and barbershops become spaces to speak about combating racial discrimination—especially within the southern United States. In You Next: How Black Barbershops Save Lives, author Antonio Johnson highlights the role of Black barbers as stewards for “shaping identity and maintaining barbershops as physical sites for community, thought and expression.” Drew, K., & Wortham, J. (2021). Black Futures. One World. p.389.
In Egbunike’s drawings, attention is paid to aesthetics insofar as beauty is within the details and the forms that usher forth from the paper. There is a kinship to Rabia Choudhary’s painted works where inner struggles play out within an array of colourful “vulnerable” figures and where the power of female identity is inter-generational and ancient. As she notes in her statement, “My work depicts experiences and struggles with tenderness, love, growth, and reclamation in regard to conflicting identities.” In this way, Choudhary can navigate the complexities of place and displacement. In these works, there is no clear answer to the struggles of identity except to be able to show how these play out within the vibrant colours, symbols, and Islamic patterns composed with great care. Her hand-fabricated paper works, in material contrast, elucidate family histories from her native Pakistan, where the paper fibres mingle with the calligraphic Urdu letterforms that speak volumes about self-reliance and learning through making. These are more subtle gestures that have monumental meanings. In The New Politics of the Handmade, artist Anthea Black and curator Nicole Burisch speak about a resurgence of craft where “Craft in all its forms, remains a mode of production that is intimately tied to [the] adaptation of identity, culture and survival to meet personal and other collective needs.”2 All of the artists in the exhibition offer these recontextualized events to understand the subject’s identity through the lens of relationships and familial ties by reclaiming past practices that have often come out of gendered contexts. For example, in Julie Luth’s work, film footage encompasses themes as diverse as contamination, everyday life, family history/genealogy, set amid postdigital wet process photography and mechanical supports. Surrounding lost and found materials, the artist enlists a process of recovery, archiving, and recontextualizing the past.
The isolation during the pandemic irrevocably changed the way we now live as the glowing screen fed us information about the outside world.3 To quote philosopher Jacques Derrida, “What is no longer archived in the same way is longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.”4 I suspect that Luth’s work ties this notion of seeing and viewing through the lens of obsolete technologies. In particular, Nothing Can Kill 100% of Germs represents an invitation to the viewer to almost forensically examine the dust, dirt, and hair within a restored slide viewer and found film. In this work, the personal is political and indeed genetic. However, there is also something else at work in Luth’s compositions and those of Charelle St-Aubin’s that have to do with how artistic practice operates in the Anthropocene. Within this broad context, it was essential for both artists to use thrifted materials and find new directions for their work by looking at previous methods for creating photographic images outside the impulse to adopt the latest technologies. Another commonality was to think about participation to promote interest and exchanges between the public, labour, processes of making, and community. This urge to involve audience participation draws on long-held associations within cultural practices that involve ritual and touch by generating meaning through public use, activating the work in present contexts. In St-Aubin’s work, A Place to Share Memories the public is invited to overlay paper onto a carved table and go through a process of creating graphite rubbings of the underlying images. The creative act is extended and shared by having the work situated in an ongoing discovery process through public engagement. In St-Aubin’s work, she revisits domestic objects by incorporating a table and chairs, carving into them precise personal images. The seats of the chairs are covered with cyanotype photography fabric and imbued with embroidery; she speaks to the connection between social and family history through the lens of assemblage and storytelling.
Black, A., & Burisch, N. (2021). The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. p.9. Here can also be found a connection to Mono-Ha that emerged in Tokyo in the 1960s and expounded upon the idea that an artist’s ability to make things had been nullified by technology. Tate. (n.d.). Mono-ha. Tate. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/mono-ha. 4 Derrida, J., & Prenowitz, E. (2005). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The University of Chicago Press. p.18. 2
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In discussing many of the works in the exhibition it may be helpful to use the term “Femmage.” Coined by Canadian-born artist Miriam Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer to examine these theoretical threads further, “Femmage” may be applied to many of the works in the exhibition that use historically conceived female domestic activities. According to curator Elissa Auther, “Schapiro’s conceptualization of ‘Femmage’ was an attempt to counter ideologies of domesticity and femininity with an assertion of the everyday that acknowledged women’s domestic agency and experience, especially in textile production.”5 Many of these concepts relating to domesticity resurface as themes of empowerment. After speaking with the students to understand the direction of their work, I couldn’t help but start to draw symbolic and even formal connections between their pieces. To use artist Barbara Kruger’s borrowed phrase from second-wave feminist thought, the “personal is political” becomes something exemplified in Sarah Formosa’s work, where personal stories of relationships become entangled with the sometimes-messy mediums of paint and drawing as exemplified in the works Expensive Lessons and Dead Weight. In these paintings, figures emerge not only as a gut reaction to loss, but as a description of what transpired and as a way to work through the stress brought about by relationship woes through the act of painting itself. We also see this thematic tie in the works of Cherilynn Tilley, whose unique combination of street art aesthetics with personal stories navigate the tricky juxtaposition of signs, text, symbols, colour and gestures. The medium of paint is as fluidly adept a material to propagate ideas as any. It can become a radical and visionary thing as a singular medium. In each case, there is no reverence placed on historicizing a particular period; instead, the artists
favour themes of displacement and atemporality, bringing to the fore a kind of disrupted realism.6 In this sense, scale and many design principles are no longer as revered as they once were. Instead, Tilley and Formosa regard painting as an extension of ultra-personal experience in their search to be bold and challenge long-standing narratives and forms (within patriarchal constructs). Tilley’s work also emphasizes how symbols coexist with deeply abject depictions, provoking a response while positing ideas that are sometimes at odds with each other by blending words and images. Whether text is pasted on the canvas or reworked and obfuscated by the quick brush strokes, it suggests an urgency to repopulate the visual lexicon with something better. Finally, there is some irony in terms of the trauma alleviated by the act of creation. Artists have frequently been able to find ways out of stressful situations by creating something “new.” Compared to the many isolated people during the pandemic, I can’t help but think that the allusions to folk and street art are something Tilley considered within the broader present context of class, social status, and social justice. Concurrently we see feminist issues examined in Kimberley Rogers’ work. In her paintings, post-pop compositions are populated by product placements that have connections to gendered family narratives revealed through the juxtaposition of consumer items that fill her canvases. In many of Rogers’ portrayals, the Western art historical canon (in this case, marble statuary) are fused with the unmonumental images of ephemeral packaging. By extension, the larger paintings find their way into other forms like zines or online content, something Rogers acknowledges as inevitable in a world where the trade of icons, symbols, and signs is unrelenting. At the same time, the link between the other artists in the exhibition is more evident by blurring the divide between “high” and “low” art. This critique has been raging since the birth of the avant-garde, when “found” objects were placed within gallery
Auther, E., “Miriam Schapiro and the Politics of the Decorative.” Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro. The Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 12, no. 1, 2019, p.78. According to curator Laura Hoptman, atemporality was first identified by Canadian author William Gibson as “a strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” Hoptman, L. (2014). The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. Published in conjunction with the exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, December 14, 2014 - April 5, 2015, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Museum of Modern Art. p.13.
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spaces designed to discuss, examine, and maintain cultural significance. The sculptural work within Roger’s practice directly references the female body as a commodity. The resurfacing of the mannequin work in pennies represents how a body might be viewed, objectified, and hence marginalized. The resistance to dominant themes in favour of personal stories runs through many of the works in this exhibition. As a result, individual narratives resurface to assert themselves as a counter to the pandemic era’s streamed content, often set adrift in a sea of fantasy stripped of its moorings to reality.
Troy David Ouellette Assistant Professor, Visual Arts Department of Visual Arts, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University
VISA 4F06 students visiting Corkin Gallery, Distillery District, Toronto.
Resurfacing
By Shannon Anderson Then suddenly a square of light came into the leaf and broke it open from the middle, and the gold of the sun streamed along the path of its veins, so that life was bursting instead of expiring, and Mira fell out, out, out of a leaf.1 Partway through Sheila Heti’s novel, Pure Colour, Mira becomes trapped in a leaf. This bizarre development in the protagonist’s life is sparked by the death of her father and the intense period of grieving that follows. Mira’s transition is surreal and abrupt: one moment, Mira is standing at the water’s edge, and the next moment, she is inside the leaf. The perspective and style of expression shift dramatically, and the reader enters a long stage of extended meditation as Mira examines her situation and communes with her father’s spirit. Eventually, and without any real explanation, Mira’s friend Annie arrives and pulls her out of the leaf. After that, the story resumes in its previous style, although Mira’s experience of this withdrawal period permeates the remainder of the book. While Heti’s leaf is a metaphor for the impact of a loved one’s death and the profound grieving that follows, it’s hard not to think of this dreamlike transition as also symbolic of the sudden change that all of us underwent in the face of isolation orders resulting from the pandemic. The global population went into an unprecedented, simultaneous period of retreat and solitude. We had never experienced anything quite like it, and it’s fair to say it has lasted much longer than anyone anticipated. Having just passed the two-year mark, and several waves in and out of isolation stemming from each new variant, we are currently living in a cautious period of resurfacing, even as cases make yet another slow climb. During my first encounter with the VISA 4F06 class, we spent the day looking at their artwork in person and having in-depth conversations about the impact of the last two 1
Heti, S. (2022). Pure Colour. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 228 (Kobo edition).
years on their life experiences and art practices. Heti’s metaphor of the leaf kept returning to my mind. Typically, it might be a somewhat artificial challenge to locate a thematic thread across the work of a class of art students— their practices tend to be so distinctive and pointed in different directions—but the pandemic’s impact on each of these students has generated a shared experience that permeates and connects all of their work. In our discussions, each of them expressed their struggles during this period, pointing out how these have necessarily filtered into their work as reflections on issues of identity, memory, connections, and relationships. Charelle St-Aubin and Julie Luth both draw from family photographs and archival material in their work. St-Aubin looks to the memories she has of her grandparents as source material for her photograph-based images and objects. She delves into her family archives, interweaving these items with expressions of her memories, allowing her to create physical manifestations of experiences that might otherwise fade over time. Luth turns to found archival material to speak to the choices people make about how they document their lives. Working with rolls of 8mm film of an anonymous family’s documentation of the mundane and celebrated events in their lives during the 1970s, Luth reworks the imagery to introduce elements of decay and contamination. She brings this imagery back to life while emphasizing its degradation. Her use of hand sanitizer and body detritus in her process references the passage of time. It begs the question, what will our own family archives look like between the years 2020 to 2022, when the gatherings that traditionally accompanied annual celebrations and milestones were sparse or cancelled altogether? Rabia Choudhary’s paintings and paper-based works reference family traditions and assertions of her sense of self amid them. Love, loss, and struggles with the ability to show our true selves to the world are ideas that permeate Choudhary’s self-portraits. Her paintings often show herself doubled, as inner and outer selves attempting to reconcile, while her works created with handmade paper each
reference a different family member and incorporate words and phrases in Urdu that speak to her relationship with them over time. Both Cherilynn Tilley and Sarah Formosa create paintings that express the process of extricating themselves from painful relationships, and the need to reclaim their sense of self-worth. Tilley’s energetic paintings revolve around the suffering caused by a destructive relationship through dark symbology and text that she repeatedly reworks in layers. Her process of putting her painful experiences on the canvas allows Tilley to expose her struggles, reassert to her own value, and move away from the past. Formosa’s paintings have also been a method for the artist to tell of an abusive relationship in order to push forward. Her images depict the various stages of her relationship through figural expressions of her vulnerability, regret, and resurgence. Kimberley Rogers’ portraits are based on her memories of the various female and male figures who have been involved in her life. Each painting, including a selfportrait, comprises painted collage elements in which
each depicted object holds profoundly personal meaning. These objects come together as disjointed and surreal figural forms. Rogers’ paintings consider how seemingly random objects can trigger deeply held memories and have the potential to release intense and unexpected emotions. Naomi Egbunike draws from her cultural background for her intricate drawings and paintings of Black women. Influenced by her childhood experiences in Nigeria and her desire to depict the body merging with the natural world, her richly textured portraits realistically integrate fantastical elements. Expressions of deep connection resonate in her subjects, who remain rooted in their surroundings while asserting their strength and confidence. Resurfacing marks a crucial moment in the lives of these seven students. Over the last two years, they’ve often had to develop their art practices in relative isolation, staying connected to each other over video and texts as a network of support. The culmination of their work reveals the inner resilience of a group of artists who have encountered tumultuous times and come out the other side with tenacity and fortitude that shines in their work.
left to right: Rabia Choudhary, Naomi Egbunike, Julie Luth, Sarah Formosa, Charelle St-Aubin, Kimberley Rogers, Cherilynn Tilley
Through the female figure, language, and cultural and religious iconography, I explore the multifaceted experiences of my life in my work. I investigate the relationship between different identities and how these intersections sometimes clash (ethnicity, religious faith, sexuality, etc.). My work depicts experiences and struggles with tenderness, love, growth, and reclamation regarding conflicting identities. Each piece examines aspects of one or more of these identities by depicting objects, clothing, jewellery, patterns, figures and/or language directly from my childhood and life. My inspiration comes from aspects of my Pakistani culture, such as Mehndi art, Salwar Kameez, Churiyan, and Bindi and traditional Islamic geometric patterns found in Masjids and Islamic art. In addition, I engage with phrases and words from Urdu, which is my mother tongue and one that I would like to reconnect with through my art practice. I incorporate my language in terms of titles, pieces, and words and poems within the backgrounds or patterns. Specific phrases and words derived from Arabic hold religious significance and reference Islamic practices that I grew up with. These works contain many hidden letters, words, and phrases, especially within the handmade paper works. I chose to create one paper for each family member, with words, phrases, and memories that remind me of them and our shared growth. In making these pages, I can deconstruct and then reconstruct my memories and my shame to create something more beautiful and delicate—something to be gentle with. The soft-touch needed to develop these pages is one I wish I had given myself in my youth. This series emerges from a need to reclaim my being, struggles, and experiences. Although the figures within my artwork intend to represent my being, the figures also represent all of us, in this very space. The memories I have used to create these artworks are ones I wish to share with you. It is in our nature to struggle with identity and who we are in a world that defines what is socially acceptable and determines who has value. Through this work, I hope you find strength, connection, worth, tenderness, vulnerability, and the growth needed as you navigate your own tender pain and memories.
RABIA CHOUDHARY
waiting on new image
(Saans; Breathe), A Retrospective of Damage Series, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 91.44cm x 121.92cm.
I was born and raised in Nigeria, which is a very culturally rich and diverse place, and most of my works tend to include my culture in some form, whether intentional or not. I am particularly interested in creating depictions of Black women that focus on their beauty and their struggles, both historically and in the present. These images resonate with my personal experience and that of other women. This body of work expands on my series Nature and the Black Woman, which combines the beauty of nature with the beauty of the Black woman. In the drawings created for this exhibition, I wanted to portray aspects of elegance, innocence, and vulnerability, as these are emotions and concepts that are not often shown in depictions of Black women. These images intertwine elements of nature. As a child, I would constantly hear Black women compared to the earth and to nature; comparisons such as “brown skin like rich soil,” “hair like trees growing up toward the sun,” and “tall like an Iroko tree.” I continue to be fascinated by these comparisons, and this project revolves around all the possible ways I can blur the line between Black women, Nigerian culture, and nature—both conceptually and literally—to create a mesmerizing whole. Trees are like the mother of nature, and they are dominant in my visual representations. They are vital to the creation and sustenance of ecosystems, and we can measure the state of our environment by how healthy or sick our trees are. I see these same qualities of resilience and power in the Black women that surround me. I also integrate ideas of growth and death in my work. Everything that blossoms will also die, including trees, flora and fauna, and human beings. Nothing can escape death. As I merge these elements of nature with the body of the Black woman, I integrate the idea of limited time and an end of growth through the dead trees that appear in some pieces and blooming flora in others. I also include animal elements as a way to add further power to the Black women in my work and honour their presence. I have always been extremely interested in surrealism, especially the combining of two seemingly mundane features to create a fantastical landscape or beings, and this plays an essential part in how I bring these various elements together in my drawing practice. My art is fundamentally a merging of fantastical imagery with traditional Nigerian art and culture. The artistic combination of culture, nature and the body present in my work can also be seen in ancient African murals and art pieces.
NAOMI EGBUNIKE
Forsaken again, 2021. Graphite on paper, 27.9cm x 21.6cm.
by the window, 2021. Graphite on paper, 21.6cm x 27.9cm.
Head of Roses, 2022. Oil on canvas, 60.6cm x 91.4cm.
My current work revolves around notions of the human condition and connections between people. I am drawn to painting female portraits and figures while experimenting with texture and colour. I am interested in exploring important discussions on awareness and mindfulness—of ourselves and others—and how everyone’s lives are just as complicated as my own, if not more. The Reliance series reflects a traumatic past relationship with a man who heavily relied on me, both financially and emotionally. He drained my financial resources through continual manipulation, and as he owed me more and more money, I became trapped and unable to leave the relationship until he paid me back. I knew that if I left him, I would never see that money again. So I stayed, but the money never materialized. The original goal of the Reliance series was to expose this person for all of the terrible things he has done. The series began with anger. But through the painting process, I came to realize that the works are actually about allowing myself to become vulnerable to my audience. The series exposes me and what I let happen. It is about the lessons that I have learned and the promise I have made to never let this happen again. The paintings express specific aspects of what I have gone through. Dead Weight and Expensive Lessons speak to how heavy his problems felt during the relationship. The painting Exhaustion focuses on how I was continually being affected, even after the relationship had ended. However, the painting process had a lot to do with the healing process. It forced me to face certain troubling thoughts and emotions so that I could heal. Dedicating months to this process led me to realize that I should be prioritizing my own happiness more than someone else’s needs. That is why I created my final painting, Broken All Ties, to represent the immaculate feeling of being free from him. As personal as this series is to me, I’d like these paintings to speak more broadly about the importance of putting yourself first, and not letting anyone take advantage of your kindness. I hope that, by being vulnerable about this part of my life, I might be able to help someone else, so that they don’t need to pay the same heavy price.
SARAH FORMOSA
Expensive Lessons, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 240cm x 180cm.
Dead Weight, 2021. Acrylic and marker on canvas, 92cm x 76cm.
Puddled Portraits (1 and 2), 2021. Acrylic and marker on cradled panel, 40cm x 48cm.
Central to my art practice is the idea of legacy and personal archives, which I explore by referencing imagery from my collection of thrifted photographs and film. In the past, I have explored the idea of memory and identity through more traditional mediums, such as drawing and painting, but I have since broadened my art practice to include analogue photography and other alternative photographic practices. My body of work, Infecting the Everyday, includes two central artworks made using clips and stills from three rolls of 8mm film shot by a family in the 1970s. The identity of this family and the context of their footage has been lost. Yet, the physical film remains and holds the moments of their everyday lives that they wanted to preserve in a tangible way. This includes clips of a child pushing a lawnmower, a man jumping off a small ledge, and a group of people waiting for the bus. Devoid of context, these small moments become representations of our own intimate experiences. Before You Touch This Wash Your Hands, is a singular 8mm film reel hand spliced together and presented using an antique 8mm film editor that I have restored. The screen of the viewer is framed by pieces of dirt and debris, so that as the footage plays the audience is confronted by both beauty and impurity. The second artwork, Nothing Can Kill 100% of Germs, is a set of homemade glass slides that can be viewed using an individual slide viewer. To create the slides, I printed stills from the films in the darkroom but disrupted their chemical processing by applying developer using a spray bottle and a small hand sanitizer dispenser. I created 35mm film positives of these images and sandwiched them between layers of watercolour, hair, dust, and fingernail clippings. I chose to present images from the 8mm films in both a moving and still format based on the following quote from the article Unfolding the In-between Image written by Masaki Kondo: “The objects depicted in the still image exist in the past but they cannot exist in the present as they did at the moment of capture. The objects that emerge in the moving image maintain their existence only in the duration of its virtual continuity...” Although we can temporarily access these past moments, we will never be able to experience them fully in the present. In reflecting upon this reality, I considered the dramatic shift in all our daily lives since the beginning of the pandemic. Our previous routines have been disrupted by necessary health precautions and the fear of contamination. Even as rates of infection begin to drop, we cannot return to our previous experiences of the everyday because our perceptions of normalcy have been fundamentally changed. When we consider our past and look to our future, we may mourn the fragments of our lives that no longer feel safe but were once mundane. Through Infecting the Everyday, I encourage the viewer to consider the coexistence of grief and beauty within the compositions I have created using domestic images from the past. As we reimagine our lives post- pandemic, I hope to remind the audience to take time to savour the small moments within our everyday lives that feel mundane. Once they have passed, we can never relive them, so it is important to recognize the beauty of these moments in the present and to treat our everyday lives as precious enough to archive in a physical way.
JULIE LUTH
Before You Touch This Wash Your Hands, Infecting the Everyday, 2022. Interactive sculpture consisting of found objects, spliced 8mm film, and dirt and dust, 12cm x 48.5cm x 20cm.
Nothing Can Kill 100% of Germs, Infecting the Everyday, 2022. Interactive sculpture consisting of a thrifted slide viewer and 2 x 2 slides with dirt, dust, hair, and watercolour applied to them, slide viewer: 10.5cm x 8cm x 8cm, slide case: 7cm x 5.25cm x 5.25cm.
Infecting the Everyday, Infecting the Everyday, 2022. A collection of approximately 150 unique analogue photographic prints, 10cm x 15.25cm.
My mixed media practice explores concepts of nostalgia, memory, and self through mediums such as acrylic paints, oil pastels, charcoal, and found or thrifted materials. My current body of work aims to challenge and subvert the body types depicted in classical Western sculpture, which portray how the “ideal” man or woman should look and act. While these works were created hundreds of years ago, we still experience the pressures and effects of these idealisms today. My paintings and mixed media works incorporate images of classical Western sculpture imagery to reimagine what these sculptures might look like if they reflected how we look and act in a contemporary context. They include depictions of objects tied to specific memories and stories of people I have encountered throughout my life; each object represents a specific memory or story. Some are comical and lighthearted, relating to happy memories, and some are quite sad and dark, relating to more traumatic events from my life. Along with my paintings, I have created zines that explain the individual components of my paintings. I like to think of this body of work as one that bridges the world of art history with modern day contemporary art through the form of abstraction. Each of these works represents different figures in my life: men are the focus of Maybe it runs in the family ; women and motherly figures in Because she said so; and My quarter life crisis is a self-portrait. I began this series by creating a digital collage that contained all of the imagery I wanted to use. I then drew a rough outline of this onto the canvas using charcoal sticks, and sprayed fixative to set the charcoal. Next, one by one, I painted each object onto the canvas. Each of these individual images is like a miniature painting in itself, and combined, they tell the story of my life.
KIMBERLEY ROGERS
Because she said so, 2022. Acrylic paint, polymer medium, charcoal, liquid gold leaf and oil stick on canvas, 244cm x 198cm.
Maybe it runs in the family, 2021. Acrylic paint, polymer medium, charcoal and oil stick on canvas, 178cm x 140cm.
A penny for your thoughts, 2021. Acrylic paint, hot glue, and pennies on plastic mannequin, 56cm x 28cm.
This body of work continues my ongoing investigation of my childhood memories, which I first began exploring as a way for me to mentally escape the difficult reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. After completing a series of drawings exploring nostalgia through found objects collected in my youth, I started creating work about my grandmothers. I have two grandmas— one on my mother’s side of the family, who is still alive and well, and another on my father’s side, who passed away when I was eight years old. My desire to hold onto my memories of my grandmothers fuels my current artistic interests. This series attempts to encapsulate memories of my grandmothers through sculptures, photographic processes, and textile-based artworks. In particular, I am interested in forming new connections with my grandmothers with sculptures that use (or are inspired by) traditional feminine crafts and gendered household chores that my grandmas would have performed, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, embroidery, knitting, and quilt-making. Bon Appétit, Love Mom references the cooking and baking my paternal grandma loved to do. I used cyanotypes (a type of photographic process) to create copies of her recipes and reupholstered the cushions of kitchen chairs with the fabric prints. These almost unreadable recipes were originally written on scraps of paper and are full of grammatical errors, grease marks, and love. While my grandma may be gone, her memory is still being passed down and shared through family meals. In A Place to Share Memories, I made a print block on a table surface and carved shapes into it that reminded me of my maternal grandma and our adventures collecting found objects. I am sharing these memories by providing printing supplies for visitors so that they can create a print or rubbing from the table to take with them. My work is inspired by early feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Faith Wilding. Many early feminist artists used traditional women’s crafts, which are not traditionally considered “high art,” to challenge the male-dominated art world. Like these feminist artists, I use domestic practices, such as sewing and baking, to create my sculptures. By learning and using these traditional skills my grandmothers would have performed, I am documenting the memories I have of them while forming new connections with my matrilineal lineage.
CHARELLE ST-AUBIN
(from left to right): Grand-maman, The Bridge by Grandma’s House, The Candy Factory Across the Street, Over the Tracks, 2022. Polaroid emulsion on mylar and paper. 10.16cm x 10.16cm
Bon Appétit, Love Mom, 2022, Sculpture, wood chairs with embroidered cyanotypes, 89cm x 40.65cm x 48.25cm.
A Place to Share Memories. 2022. Sculpture, carved wood table. 76.2cm x 101.6cm x 71.12cm.
My art practice evolves as I continue to grow as an artist. For my series Evacuation, I worked from a place of emotion and focused on expressing my feelings. The body of work is ongoing and has been a form of therapy. The inspiration for Evacuation came from my struggle to overcome traumatic experiences in my life surrounding themes such as toxic relationships, broken family ties, love and loss, and betrayal. I chose to use my art practice to work through these issues that took a toll on my mental health. This series represents my struggle with interpersonal relationships. The layered paintings often start with a foundation of dark, moody colours thrown onto the canvas and blended. Next, I incorporate imagery and text, which I later work over and cover up as I go. This process of layering is evident in Mask and Motion Sickness. The imagery I choose to include in these works represents the loss I have felt from the lack of boundaries in my relationships. I paint a rib cage because it shows that there is simply nothing left to give, and all that is left are the sad remnants of what once was. The eyeball is a more obvious metaphor for being surveyed and constantly feeling on edge, as if never able to relax or take a break. Lastly, the traffic light with all red lights is imagery I chose to use to discuss a lack of control. The traffic light has all red lights as a way for me to take back my autonomy and say no; it represents standing up and doing what one needs to do for oneself. The longer you look at the pieces, the more you find the process of dealing with any trauma is complex. As this series evolves, I continue to draw inspiration from abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism, street art, and figuration libre. Artists within these styles tend to express emotion in a way that I find extremely powerful, which is an essential part of my practice.
CHERILYNN TILLEY
Breathe, Evacuation series, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 45cm x 60cm.
Motion Sickness, Evacuation series, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 50cm.
Mask, Evacuation series, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 50cm.
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts 15 Artists’ Common St. Catharines, ON T 905 688 5550 x4765 brocku.ca/miwsfpa Niagara Artists Centre 354 St. Paul Street St. Catharines, ON T 905 641 0331 nac.org
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April, 2022