Folio — Winter 2010

folio

Issue 3 ­­— Winter 2010 McGill Art + Design

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Folio Coordinating Editors Benjamin Peck Leah Pires Staff Daniel Becker Francesca Bianco Patrick Caire Tyler Chau Charlotte Lewis Milena Paprok Justine Perrot Alexa Roach Eric Schreiber Pooja Sen Claire Stewart Contact foliomag@gmail.com foliomagazine.ca

About Folio is a student-run visual art and design magazine that acts as an ongoing archive of McGill’s artistic community by providing a venue for student artists to showcase their work. It is published biannually.

Cover: Francesca Anderson Facing page: Janine Reitsma All contents Š the respective artists.

Opinions expressed in Folio are not necessarily those of McGill University.

folio magazine : Issue 3 — Winter 2010 ­ Contents Seeing through Francesca Anderson

NW secret places Stephen Froese

Mexican pilgrimage—in stereo Rodrigo Emilio Solano-Quesnel

Small things Janine Reitsma

Insane Gown Posse: mall portraits from Gay Hell Bobby Ezekiel Chirila

An algorithm Nicholas Esterer

Vis sit cum te Kate Howells I felt Ming Lin Cream on penis Andy White

Untitled Riley Fleck

Ice cream city Benjamin Yuri Feldman

KATE HOWELLS Vis sit cum te

MING LIN I felt

Andy white Cream on penis

STEPHEN FROESE NW Secret Places

BobbY EZEKIEL CHIRILA Insane Gown Posse: mall portraits from Gay Hell

RILEY FLECK Untitled

RODRIGO EMILIO SOLANO-QUESNEL Mexican pilgrimage­—in stereo

Viewing instructions: Cross your eyes to see three images.

Focus on the middle image and let your eyes adjust.

The center image will emerge in 3-D.

NICHOLAS ESTERER An algorithm

BENJAMIN YURI FELDMAN Ice cream city

folio contributors Francesca Anderson took the photo on the cover of this issue from the eleventh floor of her old apartment through a screen divider on the deck. It reminds her of summer dusks, warm, humid air, and hoping that her neighbors won’t see her sitting on the porch in the nude. Francesca tends to photograph things that are fleeting.

Stephen Froese took these photos while thinking about art as a scientific approach to life: “Making hypotheses and then seeing how it works out when you try to live out that idea as thoroughly as you can.” NW Secret Places is a place on a map he found at his parents’ house. He went there once but might not be able to find it again.

Bobby Ezekiel Chirila, aka Miss Lady Swamp Pussy, made these “post-tumblr, post-copyright ‘digital collages’” for the members of his band, Insane Gown Posse.

The two driving forces behind everything he does are 1) exaggerate until it’s Realer than Real and 2) try to “keep it fun or at least interesting to people who could give a fuck about [his] own lil masturbatory concepts.” He’s inspired by 32-/64-bit video game glitches, John Waters, Rob Zombie, Yayoi Kusama, depression, bad hygeine, middle english poetry, and cartoonish violence. Find him at bobbyiyezekiil.tumblr.com.

Kate Howells studies Psychology and Classics, and her creative work reflects this—she has a particular fondness for brains and gods (including, in her books, Carl Sagan). The collages featuring him combine stills from his show Cosmos and brain scans she pilfered from the trash at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Vis sit cum te, her Latin translation of “May the force be with you” might be a little rough, but we expect only true, true nerds to notice.

Nicholas Esterer’s contribution to Folio is a concept drawing for one of his music compositions. The levels correspond to different musical events and the indices to points in time that they occurred. His models are always tweaked in the end; they’re more of a means to generate material. Ideally, he would like to create a music that is saturated with intricate patterns that reveal new coherencies upon successive listenings, like the way constellations appear after looking at the night sky for a long time. He thinks mathematics, as a description of patterns, can perhaps help him with such creation.

Benjamin Yuri Feldman Do you believe in never? Do you believe in always? It’s like when you crack open a coconut and all of infinity sprays out. Then, everything turns into ice cream and everyone can climb skyscrapers. “You’re a true blue movie star.” Let me film you thinking about that so that you can live forever before everything melts.

Riley Fleck makes visual art very infrequently, and it usually consists of drawing things that are immediately in front of him. These two pieces are part of a series of drawings with shitty black pens on printer paper that blur the line between liberal humanism and anthropomorphized rabbits. His main sources for inspiration were pictures of “international development.”

Ming Lin is becoming less and less interested in flat mediums and aesthetic outcomes. She would like to create living art: art that is performed, has a shelf life, or demands immediate action. Her pages in Folio, which may or may not reflect this, consider textures as a way to evoke different feelings. Supple skin, barnacled rock, a wig—all created by the movement and pressure of a pencil. They’re also about small intimate moments and pleasures, how beautiful her mother looked in profile at that moment, a date at the museum, these things must not be forgotten.

Janine Reitsma’s ink drawing, found on the first page of this issue, was created from the inside out. She’s interested in illustrations from children’s books published between 1900 and 1940, and the shapes that exist everywhere around us if you just look for them.

Rodrigo Emilio Solano-Quesnel took his stereogram photos with two Kodak EC70 point-and-shoot cameras taped together lengthwise. He is currently working towards a Bachelor of Theology and a Master of Divinity, simultaneously. His studies inspire his work.

Andy White describes his art as either “Cool Time” or “Stupid Life.” He uses Photostudio and Photoshop to edit images (mostly copying and pasting) into what they should be. “Florida is sick, LA is cool, Tokyo rules, Boston sucks, SF is OK, I love cats. I like the idea... I like the idea.”

Thanks to the AUS Fine Arts Council, the Students’ Society of McGill University, and the Dean of Arts Development Fund for their generous support.