Contemporary arts take over the Fofa gallery for the 2014 Rentrée
Concordia’s faculty of fine arts has started the year with a bang: the faculty’s FOFA Gallery, located on the ground floor of Concordia’s EV building, held a vernissage Sept. 4 to usher in the new school year and its three newest exhibitions.
Parallax: Landscapes in Translation, located in the York corridor vitrine, is the collaborative project of Cynthia Hammond, Kelly Thompson and Kathleen Vaughan. The three artists, who all work for the university, used a variety of mediums, from acrylic on canvas to woven fibres, which often represented the departments they are a part of.
“The work is really talking about landscape and the passage of time, and travel, and discovery as you’re walking through spaces,” said Jennifer Dorner, the new FOFA Gallery director. “And it’s really functioning in that way, within the space itself.”
As visitors enter the main room of the gallery, they seem to topple into a completely different world, one of sharp black and whites and thumping bass: the world of Eyelash Wars. The product of the duo Inflatable Deities, also known, individually, as Emily Pelstring and Jessica Mensch, Eyelash Wars is the story of two beauty vendors in a battle for commercial supremacy. The piece is backed by a “warped new-age rap soundtrack,” as described by the FOFA Gallery site. The display is also visible from the Ste-Catherine vitrine.
“It’s a really fun premise,” added Dorner. “It’s very playful, a little bit absurd…They’ve used a really nice range of technology, and performance and painting, and really recreated the space.”
The last exhibit, That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious course of things interrupted, occupies the Black Box room of the gallery. An interactive work by Jérôme Nadeau, the exhibit is composed of light-sensitive photographic papers on a white table. Visitors are encouraged to don white gloves and move the papers around, causing them to slowly shift in colour. Every hour, a picture of the table is taken and uploaded to the FOFA website, allowing viewers to track the changes in the gallery.
“His idea is that the photographic paper becomes the document of the exhibition experience,” said Dorner. “It’s a beautiful piece, and it’s going to change as the exhibition goes on.”
The vernissage concluded with a musical performance by Inflatable Deities in the main gallery. The current exhibitions will be on display until Oct. 19. The FOFA Gallery is located on the ground floor of the EV Building in the Sir George Williams campus.
