Folio — Winter 2009

folio

Issue 1 — ­­ Spring 2009

Staff Editors Angel Chen Leah Pires Curators Claire Boucher Angel Chen Ming Lin Jennifer Markowitz Leah Pires Mikael Rubin Photographer Stephen Davis Contact foliomag@gmail.com foliomag.wordpress.com About Folio is a student-run visual art and design magazine that aims to act as an ongoing archive of McGill’s artistic community by providing a venue for student artists to showcase their work.

Cover: Ellie Payne Smith Facing page: April Martin All contents Š the respective artists.

folio magazine : Issue 1 — Spring 2009 ­ Contents Leo April Martin

Paper irony Michael Fohring

Olympus Aaron Vansintjan

Exposures Daphne Schuller

Nevermind Ellie Payne Smith

Necessaria Kim Finch

We grow together Ming Lin

8 polygons Angel Chen

Portobello Road Priam Poulton-McGraw

Z at urated Sha do w ee d Andy White

displace.gif David Ertel

Rash Matthew James

DAPHNE SCHULLER Exposures

MING LIN We grow together

ANDY WHITE Z at urated Sha do w ee d

MICHAEL FOHRING Paper irony

ELLIE PAYNE SMITH Nevermind

ANGEL CHEN 8 polygons

DAVID ERTEL displace.gif

AARON VANSINTJAN Olympus

KIM FINCH Necessaria

PRIAM POULTON-McGRAW Portobello Road, London

MATTHEW JAMES Rash

folio contributors Angel Chen is a wannabe conceptual artist who works infrequently and late at night. She illustrates a biweekly column for The McGill Daily that she describes as stupid and childish, but also kind of smart.

Her undergraduate philosophy thesis on the artistic status of street art is currently ruining her life.

David Ertel, a student of music and linguistics, has mainly benefited from his studies at McGill vis-à-vis his creative aspirations. “The Faculty of Music and its students would benefit from eroding the school’s sharp distinction between the technical performer and the creative composer,” he says. His contributions to Folio are stills from animated gifs.

Kim Finch notices, collects, and arranges natural objects to highlight the beauty already present in nature.

Her work centres around the idea that contemporary society has lost touch with nature. She studied sculpture at the Alberta College of Art and Design before pursuing an Environment degree at McGill. She hopes to one day combine her love of art with a career in environmentalism.

Michael Fohring is an architecture student whose creativity is driven by everyday life. His contribution to Folio is composed of balsa wood, acrylic paint, and snippets of poems and prose on paper. It is a play on the physical versus figurative characteristics of literature. “Isn’t it ironic that something so vivid, engaging, and truly three-dimensional exists in the form of black ink on a flat piece of white paper?”

April Martin gets most of her creative ideas while perched atop a lifeguard chair. Just the other day, a 70-year-old woman in a hot pink bathing suit was performing her daily flotation ritual while everyone around her was intently driving their bodies through the water – that was pretty inspiring. April enjoys tactile mediums such as embroidery and and she recommends McGill’s costume-making course for all wayward creative souls.

Priam Poulton-McGraw enjoys street photography, spray-painting on digital prints, and creating assemblages of found objects. “Composition and framing isolate aesthetically beautiful images that are often impossible to perceive without a camera,” he explains.

His weapon of choice is a digital SLR outfitted with manual lenses from the 1970s and 1980s.

Daphne Schuller’s photo ideas come to her in dreams, so her nightstand is stacked with pages of doodles and notes. She enjoys layering images with double and triple exposures and shooting with Diana+ and Holga cameras. Her artistic process involves walking around and shooting anything that strikes her as beautiful or ugly, and she likes to make passersby wonder what she’s up to.

Ellie Payne Smith is inspired by vivid dreams and people who look younger than they are. She shoots with a Canon F1, a Nikonos V, and colour transparencies. She describes her work as “materialized fantasies, not to be taken too seriously.” Ellie spent a year taking pictures in Paris before attending McGill.

Matthew James only started making art recently, though he had a brief stint at an art high school that ended in expulsion. His contribution to Folio is an excerpt from an autobiographical comic about sleep paralysis drawn entirely on Post-It notes. Matthew compares his relationship with artmaking to the rash on his belly – both came into his life about six ago, and scratching their itch feels pretty darn good.

Aaron Vansintjan uses an Olympus point-and-shoot to take photos of things that aren’t there and frame things that shouldn’t be framed. He sees art as a game: “You write out the rules for yourself, and then you act within them.” He studies philosophy and his fascinations include constructivism, Dada, and expressionism. He thinks Art for Art’s Sake is a farce.

Ming Lin likes to paint watercolours of people with their belongings in inevitable situations. By emphasizing imperfections with colour, she hopes to render them beautiful. Ming draws inspiration from plants, vintage postcards, Fluxus, and the idyllic world of technicolour film. She describes her relationship with art as nonchalant, and her study of anthropology informs her work.

Andy White invites you to visit the Floridian peninsula through his computer-created visions of the past and future. He thought living in Orlando was no big deal until he came to McGill and realized the paradise he’d taken for granted. Homework and artmaking compete for his attention, and when he sees pictures come together in his head and on the screen, he just says “Fuck you, coursepack. I don’t want to be your bro tonight.”

f They say that the internet is the future of print.

Download your digital edition of Folio at foliomag.wordpress.com.

Folio warmly thanks the Fine Arts Council of the Arts Undergraduate Society of McGill for its generous support.

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Email us at foliomag@gmail.com or visit foliomag.wordpress.com for more information.