Author: Emma Bell

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Arts and Culture Exhibit

Confronting the anthropocene through art

View of Vitrine, Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian

Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts celebrates the collaborative research project of a graduate seminar.

The vitrine display space at the core of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Concordia’s EV building currently hosts the cumulative research project that the students of Dr. Johanne Sloan’s graduate seminar, Confronting the Anthropocene: Theory, Activism, and Art, collaborated on last winter. The vitrine aims to showcase the depth of creativity among Concordia’s fine arts and art history students, and this dynamic, colourful, and eye-catching display fits its purpose.

The “Anthropocene” is a concept that emerges in discussions surrounding the ecological crisis as the reality of climate change forces us to reconcile with the natural world. Dr. Sloan explains in the curatorial statement that the term problematically implies that “all humans (“anthropos”) are equally responsible for the dire state of the planet.” The display offers a lexicon of alternative terms that more precisely describe the reality of who and what ought to be held proportionally accountable. 

Caro DeFrias served as the vitrine’s coordinator during the 2022-2023 academic year. They described the vitrine as an “exciting and urgent space” that stands as a celebration and a site of exercise for the Concordia student body and its classes. While the coordinator serves a largely facilitative role, DeFrias participated as a curator for the final project of the year along with their seminar peers. This display is a testament to their creative vision.

The project presented the students with the question of how the concept of the Anthropocene impacts the way they look at visual art that represents the natural world. The students each reinterpreted a work of art and crafted an “alternative museum label” for it that deliberately responds to this question. 

DeFrias writes of Agnes Martin’s The Rose: “In presenting a rosy haze, Martin appears to reject the traps of symbolism and iconography which might lead us to the appropriation or taking-for-granted of the rose as a symbol of human desire or an aesthetic object. Instead, The Rose undoes these lines and presents us with the grid and a new way of looking — asking us to feel and tenderly come to know The Rose as a subject.” The grid speaks to the networks that constitute the relationship between human behaviour and the agency of non-human species. 

The exhibit draws from the existing literature  that shaped the backbone of Sloan’s course, including the work of Black feminist scholar Christina Sharpe, Métis anthropologist Zoë Todd, Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear, and ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway, among others. The gridded backdrop of the vitrine display intertwines this vocabulary among imagery of flora and fauna, visually demonstrating the entanglements between humanity and nature. 

The vitrine can be found across from the graduate seminar room (EV 3.760) and will be up until a new coordinator is selected in late September.

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Arts and Culture Culture Student Life

Engaging Religion at 4th Space

(Left to Right) Ellen Dobrowolski, Dr. Sowparnika Balaswaminathan, and Dr. Naftali Cohn during the panel discussion. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian

Scholars and faculty of Concordia’s department of Religions and Cultures discuss the discipline.

Concordia University’s 4th Space hosted a panel discussion with participating graduate students and faculty from the department of Religions and Cultures to address what it means to choose religion as a field of study. The panellists included PhD Candidate Ellen Dobrowolski, Dr. Sowparnika Balaswaminathan, Dr. Naftali Cohn, PhD student Jordan Molot, and MA graduate Katrina Kardash, and was moderated by PhD Candidate Arwa Hussain. While each participant brought a unique background and perspective to the table, they were united in their passion for a department that holds space for interdisciplinary research interests and methods. Each panellist maintained that their curiosity gradually pulled them through twists and turns toward religious studies.

The study of religion can open up opportunities to engage with difficult cross-disciplinary questions. For example, Dobrowolski’s PhD research discusses how a person’s religious identity might reinforce or undermine their ethnic identity. As a scholar with both Métis and Brazilian heritage, Dobrowolski observed that their Catholic upbringing tended to complicate the acceptance of their indigeneity, while simultaneously strengthening that of their Latin background. This experience informs their research onthe life and work of Sara Riel, the first Métis Grey Nun missionary. 

As seen through Dobrowolski’s research, the department of Religions and Cultures fosters a breadth of study that is at once deeply personal and widely relevant within secular academia.  Each project is unique. Dr. Balaswaminathan’s work investigates how a community of artisans in her home country of India struggle to honour the integrity of their traditional crafts in a world that increasingly commodifies the artistic production of the Global South. Meanwhile, Dr. Cohn examines the representation of diverse cultures and the performance of religious rituals in the media. Second year PhD student Jordan Molot, on the other hand, studies the history of Jewish settlers in Canada and their entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade. Recent MA graduate Katrina Kardash unearths the intimate lives of evangelical Christian communities in order to understand the dynamics of gender within their domestic spaces. All of these projects draw from personal experience and demonstrate how our personal trajectories can deeply inform our academic endeavours. 

After sharing their own research and experience within the department, the panellists wrapped up with some advice to prospective graduate students who may be seeking to join the program. The group was unanimous on how the study of religion opens the doors to diverse experiences with people and places you may never have otherwise encountered, and anyone who is fueled by the desire to learn new languages, travel, and discover new perspectives ought to consider religious studies. In a more practical sense, prospective students should begin to flesh out exactly what questions they would like to investigate and reach out to professors to build connections, setting them on a path toward success. 

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Arts Arts and Culture

Three Artists Speak on Intimacy, Identity, and Introspection

(Left to Right) Emem Etti, Spencer Magnan, and Inka Kennepohl pose for a photo after their panel discussion. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian

Concordia’s VAV Gallery in Sir George Williams campus’ VA building recently hosted an intimate conversation with three artists who participated in their summer residency program as they prepare for their upcoming vernissage. Inka Kennepohl, Spencer Magnan and Emem Etti shared how their distinct studio practices all converge on themes of identity, introspection and material exploration. 

 All three artists emphasize the value of a process that demands focus and concentration, one that generates a contemplative state of mind as they are at work. This method opens up an introspective space for the artist to dwell in as they engage in a very physical, repetitive process. Every knot and stitch is infused with the care and patience of the maker’s hand—they inevitably speak to a deep connection between the material and the body. 

Nigerian-Canadian artist Emem Etti’s practice blends the disciplines of film and fibres to create dynamic installations of video projection that animate their handmade rugs. Their work at VAV was largely an effort to orient their energy inward, to reach an ambitious state of mindfulness achieved through the consistent, rhythmic motions of handcrafting. 

During the panel discussion, Etti noted the deliberate choice to use a punch-needle to craft their rugs rather than the more efficient needle gun, for using the gun was a “violent” experience—the tool is difficult to control. While it works faster than going stitch-by-stitch, it tends to be a chaotic creative process rather than the steady, intentional method the artist prefers. Etti remarks: “I think there is something really beautiful about the meticulous.” This decision speaks to Etti’s concern with the relationship between the artist and their materials. There is an intimacy there, as the artwork is an extension of the artist. The care and time the artist spends engaging with the material is tantamount to tenderly caring for their own body. The final product, the rug, is a symbol of connection, of being radically present with the self.  

In progress work, Courtesy of Emem Etti

In a similar fashion, Spencer Magnan draws from personal experience as a queer artist to inform his theatrical, oversized wearable pieces. During his time at VAV, Magnanhand-sewed a giant suit jacket made entirely of unstretched canvas. The work serves as a commentary on the inherently masculine-coded garment and playfully reinterprets it as a dramatic costume, hinting at the performative nature of gender expression. Magnan chose this material to add another layer of gender identity to the piece. “I feel like in 2023, it’s still a very masculine thing to make a painting,” Magnan says, pointing to the persistently male-dominated discipline that continues to root itself in rigidly exclusionary and eurocentric traditions. 

The artist consciously left the canvas unpainted and allowed the qualities of the raw material—the rough texture, the loose-hanging threads, the sandy colour, and the visible hand-stitching—to constitute the character of the jacket. This decision undermines the expectations of what a proper, masculine suit jacket is expected to be—polished, tailored, and luxurious. It reinterprets the garment through a queer sensibility that refuses to conform to an established, heteronormative standard and rather celebrates imperfection, individuality, and drama. 

Meanwhile, Inka Kennepohl engages with textiles differently. Moving away from the commercial practice of creating luxury commodities out of textiles, they use the techniques as a means of object repair. Their work during their residency at VAV combined macramé, a knotting technique, and furniture design to assemble pieces that exist somewhere between the functional and the conceptual. Kennepohl spoke of the ways sustainability informs their sculptural practice and emphasized the urgency of rebuilding and repurposing materials through acquired skill rather than discarding them and perpetuating a cycle of consumption and waste. 

Courtesy of Inka Kennepohl

Their work sparked conversations regarding the relationship between labour and art, and raised important questions concerning the boundaries an artist should draw between the integrity of their vision and the very real need to maintain a marketable production capacity in order to make a living. The discussion addressed pressing questions that seem to permeate this emerging generation of young artists. How can they honour the slow and steady process of handcrafting a work of art in such a fast-paced consumer culture? How should they tread the fine line between supporting ourselves and refusing to concede to commercialization?

The cumulative bodies of work produced by Etti, Magnan and Kennepohl during their summer residency will be featured in the VAV Gallery space this fall, and the vernissage will be held Monday, September 11, 2023. 

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