Category: Exhibit

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Arts Arts and Culture Exhibit

You are here: Tania Lara’s “Autogéographies”

View of the gallery, Tania Lara’s Autogéographies. Courtesy of La Centrale galerie Powerhouse. Photo by Lucie Rocher

Lara’s solo exhibition is open at La Centrale galerie Powerhouse.

Inside everyone’s head is a map. It tells us how to get from home to work to school and back again. Maybe it requires some nudging from Google Maps sometimes, but ultimately it guides us through our corner of the world, and it is always changing. 

“Autogéographies” by Tania Lara, exhibited this fall at La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, graciously offers its viewers a look inside the artist’s personal map. Lara questions the assumed authority of the map by carefully embroidering tapestries with parts of her own mind’s map. Her work combines textiles and personal narrative while simultaneously stitching together disparate parts of visual art, geography and philosophy. 

 A feminist, artist-run space dedicated to the dissemination of multidisciplinary artistic practices, La Centrale is the ideal locale for Lara’s project. Founded in 1973, the gallery is one of the first artist-run spaces in Canada and has a long history of putting artists first and encouraging experimentation. Their archives are housed at Concordia University and are accessible online and in person at the Vanier library on Loyola’s campus.

“Autogéographies” combines textile, installation, and video work resulting from a research-creation project undertaken in part during the artist’s time pursuing a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM. 

Throughout the exhibition, Lara focuses on the idea of porous borders, bringing into question the authority bestowed upon borders and exploring the liminal space between them. The gallery has a soft, gauzy feeling created by the semi-opaque material of the flowing tapestries that take up most of the space. Displayed with videos of hand-drawn topographic lines projecting on top of them, the works are in constant flux, resisting the static display of classical maps. 

View of the gallery, Tania Lara’s Autogéographies. Courtesy of La Centrale galerie Powerhouse. Photo by Lucie Rocher.

These pieces move with the breeze of people passing by and change according to the projections. Motifs of home take the form of place-settings with knives and forks, windows, checkered kitchen floors and flowers which are peppered through the tapestries, giving the exhibition a playful feel.

The exhibition as a whole is set up on a diagonal axis, further throwing the idea of a guiding map into question by tipping the axis of the North-South cardinal points. Greeting the viewers as they enter are two textile pieces, installed side by side on a diagonal wall. 

The first textile piece, “Autogéographies 1 (2021),” is one of the smaller ones in the show.  It is a quilt showing multiple scenes including a dinner table, a moving train, a garden, a fire, and finally hills receding into the distance, all in a colour palette of oranges, blues, and greys. 

Tania Lara, Autogéographies 1 (2021). Courtesy of La Centrale galerie Powerhouse. Photo by Lucie Rocher.

The second, “Autogéographies 2 (2021)” is another quilt in grid formation with each panel showing a different map, some with handwritten interventions on top. Together the two pieces set the tone for the show by playing with the idea of a map and rendering it soft in its materiality and personal in its content.

One of Lara’s noted influences in the project is Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s theorization of opacity as a response to colonial intervention. He questions the necessity for the transparency found in Western thought, and proposes opacity—the inability to see, the unknowable—as a method of self-determination, as though to say, you don’t need to know all of me to exist with me. 

Detail, Tania Lara’s Autogéographies. Courtesy of La Centrale galerie Powerhouse. Photo by Lucie Rocher.

Glissant writes in his seminal text Poetics of Relations, “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.” Indeed, Lara weaves together opacities, allowing for moments of both transparency and obfuscation. Mapping is always an act of translation, from 2D to 3D, from the land beneath our feet to the pixels of the cell phones between our hands. Lara’s personal map is on display, and the key to its translation is just beyond our grasp. Perhaps it will always remain that way. 

“Autogéographies” is ongoing until Nov. 9, 2023 and is free to attend.

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Arts Arts and Culture Exhibit

When birds echo humanity: the uncanny art of Mara Eagle

Mara Eagle discussed her work at the vernissage for “Pretty Talk,” FoFA Gallery, Concordia University. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian.

Birds or humans? Eagle blurs the lines with “Pretty Talk.”

Concordia’s FOFA (Faculty of Fine Arts) Gallery has been echoing with all sorts of unsettling sounds this past week. Not to be alarmed,  it has simply been hosting Mara Eagle’s “Pretty Talk” exhibition.

Eagle, an American artist, has designed a unique audiovisual experience for her audience. Stepping into the FOFA Gallery, it is impossible to ignore the strange yet familiar sounds that pierce the heavy black curtain separating the exhibition room from the receptionist’s office. Behind the curtain, an incongruous setting is revealed: in the middle of a dimly lit room surrounded by a white picket fence, the only furnishings are two white Adirondack chairs placed on a faux grass tile. 

Viewers watching “Pretty Talk,” FoFA Gallery, Concordia University. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian.

On the wall facing the chairs, a 15-minute 3D animation—rendered in a disturbing, uncanny-valley-like style—is projected on a loop. On the opposite wall, a descriptive sheet indicates that the soundtrack—which sharpens once the viewer enters the space and reveals all manner of human noises such as farts, baby cries, laughter, screams and more—is in fact made up of bird mimicry. 

In the short animated film, increasingly repulsive characters appear in turn, such as a huge infant with facial and torso hair and a grandfather with shark-like teeth. They are merely pale imitations of human beings: their jerky movements, misshapen and offbeat facial expressions, grotesquely proportioned bodies, and lifeless eyes all betray their artificiality and send chills down the spine.

The soundtrack is composed of hundreds of fragments of mimicked human sounds, which combined to the visuals make for a rather horrifying experience. The superimposition of the muffled and high-pitched bird mimicry noises creates a cacophony that sounds alien. 

Mara Eagle discussed her work at the vernissage for “Pretty Talk,” FoFA Gallery, Concordia University. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian.

The 3D animation and accompanying soundtrack are played in a loop until the gallery closes, allowing viewers to watch the whole thing as many times as they need to absorb the work’s weirdness. Afterwards, the audience can watch a seven-minute video about the artist’s creative process in a more intimate screening room toward the exit. 

On the screen, Eagle explains that she created the soundtrack first and foremost. The visuals were thereafter created to fit the sounds and were animated by her collaborator Calum MacConnell. Eagle explains that she spent a long while researching and collecting hundreds of hyper-realistic bird mimicry sound samples on the internet using YouTube and other platforms, for she wanted her project to be very low budget and DIY. She then collaged and organized all the bird sound samples, which ended up making a 15-minute soundtrack. She was inspired to make her project into a loop because of how repetitive bird speech tends to be. 

The bizarre, interesting and complete experience of “Pretty Talk” is not only enthralling, but it also serves a good cause. Eagle is working in collaboration with a Quebec-based organization called Perroquetsecours to raise funds towards rehoming birds that are in need of adoption. Her tote bags are for sale at the FOFA gallery for $25 and all of the proceeds will be donated to this cause.

Tote bag for “Pretty Talk,” FoFA Gallery, Concordia University. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian.
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Arts and Culture Exhibit

Concordia Fine Arts Student Exhibits at the AGO

View of Gallery 249, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Mallory Lowe Mpoka in Re-Mixing African Photography. Photo by Emma Bell/The Concordian

Queer Cameroonian-Belgian artist and Concordia Studio Arts BFA student Mallory Lowe Mpoka is currently exhibiting at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto as part of a group exhibition titled Re-Mixing African Photography: Kelani Abass, Mallory Low Mpoka and Abraham Oghobase. The exhibition is situated in the inner gallery space of the Department of the Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora. Established in 2020, the department seeks to redress the representation of both historic and contemporary African art through their programming and exhibitions. 

Three artists draw from Western and Central African traditions of studio portraiture in order to critically examine the history of photography within broader conversations of the African diaspora. Mpoka’s work makes use of a variety of materials such as archival family photos and natural pigments in order to explore themes of home, heritage, belonging and connection. 

The Self-Portrait Project (2020) is a pair of black and white photographs that feature two staged self-portraits of Mpoka standing with one leg resting on a stool. In both images, Mpoka holds a framed vintage photograph of her father close to her body—a gesture that speaks to her connection with her Bamileke heritage. The family portrait signifies the distance between past and present, where the commemoration of heritage is rooted in a sense of loss. 

 Her dynamic posture is both nonchalant and assertive. She engages the viewer and invites them into the image, but she does not directly return their gaze, for her eyes are obscured by dark sunglasses or the brim of a hat. Her stance creates an impactful exchange of looks between the subject and the audience. She offers a glimpse into her identity, but keeps a protective distance from the viewer. The portraits maintain that there is always a measure of opacity in agency; the artist reserves the right to carefully choose what she reveals.

Mallory Lowe Mpoka. The Self-Portrait Project I, 2020. Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper, Overall: 48.3 × 55.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Mallory Lowe Mpoka.
Mallory Lowe Mpoka. The Self-Portrait Project II, 2020. Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper, Overall: 48.3 × 55.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Mallory Lowe Mpoka

Mpoka’s series What Lives Within Us is an experimental multimedia project that expands on this notion of memory and heritage by blending material and image. The series brings together found photographs from Mpoka’s family archives and craft techniques such as natural dye processes, collage and embroidery. Mpoka reworks the photographs using materials from her family’s sewing workshop in Douala, Cameroon. The threads she uses were hand-dyed with pigments from Cameroon’s highland soil. By sewing the thread directly onto the surface, she obscures and thus protects the identity of the subjects. This action is another assertion of privacy as she negotiates her sense of belonging.

Mallory Lowe Mpoka, What Lives Within Us, Gallery 249. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Photo by Emma Bell

Re-Mixing African Photography will be on view until January 7, 2024. Admission is free of charge for all Indigenous peoples, AGO members, Annual Passholders and visitors aged 25 and under.

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Arts and Culture Exhibit

The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project: Hijack the Gender!: A Discussion between Artist and Curator

siren eun young jung and Ji-Yoon Han discuss A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery. Photo by Emma Bell/The Concordian

One of the kick-off events of Montreal’s 18th edition of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image was a discussion between curator Ji-Yoon Han and artist siren eun young jung at her solo exhibition The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project: Hijack the Gender! held at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery on Concordia’s Sir George Williams campus. 

“siren eun young jung makes work that explores the subversive potential of popular cultural practices and highlights the existence of communities that, to this day, maintain spaces for dissimilar and non-conforming people within a given society,” Han says. 

Yeoseong Gukgeuk, which translates to “national women’s theatre,” is the central subject of the artist’s 15-year archival project. The theatre was made up exclusively of female actors and was popularised in the mid-twentieth century following the end of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Through her work, jung explores the actors’ embodiment of masculine roles on stage through the lens of queer theory, particularly queer scholar Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. jung seeks to critically examine the heteronormative national identity of Korea by building an “anomalous archive,” or what she also calls a “wrong archive,” that inherently resists the official version of national history. 

The discussion began in the archive room, where jung discussed her collection of materials offering insight into the story of the women who were involved at the theatre and who participated in the project. The archive reveals the unique visual culture of the theatre while preserving its legacy in a historical canon that often neglects to include the stories of marginalised people. The archive is not just a collection of print media, photographs and documents that tell a linear narrative of the tradition—it also includes oral history through interviews and personal accounts from performers, along with experimental videos of performances that collectively contribute to a living archive that will change over time as it grows. 

siren eun young jung, View of Deferral Archives (2018-2023), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery. Photo by Emma Bell/The Concordian
siren eun young jung, Deferral Archives (2018-2023) Detail, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery. Photo by Emma Bell/The Concordian

The notion of disrupting exclusionary national identities is reflected in jung’s aesthetic choices. The scattered light refracting off the reflective survival blankets that line the gallery walls similarly disrupts the traditionally crisp white void that the artwork would normally hang on. The editing technique employed in jung’s video works can also be described as disruptive and fractured—flashing lights and diagonal cropping make for a chaotic viewing experience of an already larger-than-life screen. This visual language reinforces a sense of rupture in the way history is remembered.

The discussion moved through the gallery space as jung and Han spoke about the importance of transmitting the knowledge of the past through this project and its relevance in contemporary culture. It goes without saying that there is a need within our current moment to not only preserve but to bring marginalised histories into the spotlight. 

The video work A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise features performances from drag king Azangman, queer Korean female actors such as Lee Yii, Seo Jiwon of the disabled women’s theatre group Dancing Waist, and the transgender electronic musician Kirara. The installation completely immerses the audience in the performances, enveloping them in a full sensory experience to invite them into a theatrical world that embraces and celebrates creative transgression and alternative ways of being.

The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project: Hijack the Gender! is one of 23 exhibitions that constitute MOMENTA 2023 and will be on view at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery within Concordia’s J.W. McConnell building through October 28, 2023.  

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Arts and Culture Exhibit

Lasting Impressions: Showcasing the Possibilities of Print

View of Lasting Impressions Vitrine Exhibit, Webster Library. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian

Webster library hosts a retrospective exhibition from Concordia’s special edition program.

As students begin to use the Webster library during the first few weeks of the school year, some may notice the vitrine display to the left of the entrance stairs. Concordia’s special editions program within the Print Media Department currently has a temporary exhibition on display titled Lasting Impressions. Founded in the 1990s by Judy Garfin and Cheryl Kolak, the program “fosters creative, collaborative and pedagogical opportunities for visiting artists, master printers and students.” This exhibit was curated by Director Erika Adams and showcases a retrospective collection of works produced over the past couple of decades that demonstrate the breadth of techniques that artists have engaged with. 

The printmaking techniques range from lithography to screen printing, and each artist contributed a unique visual language to the body of work.

Lithography is a fairly complicated method that takes advantage of the way water naturally repels oil. A drawing made on a textured, stone surface with oil based materials is etched into the surface through a chemical process. Once the oily image is fixed onto the stone, the artist will pass a wet sponge over the surface before rolling on an oil-based ink. With the properties of oil and water at work, the ink will only stick to the oily image, while the watery negative space remains clean. The artist can now transfer the image onto paper by running it through a printing press. 

The nature of lithography allows for a more detailed result—every mark made by the artist will appear in the final print, thus there is more opportunity for value, complicated linework, and an overall painterly appearance. Take Betty Godwin’s 2003 Escape for example: at a glance, this print appears to be a drawing. This simple lithograph features a diving figure whose elongated body is rendered with a quick hand. The diver’s limbs are mere suggestions constituted of hasty linework and smudged ink. A quiet object, perhaps a pillar, in the background softly emerges through more linework. This level of delicacy, texture, and value beautifully captures the possibilities of this method. 

Betty Goodwin, Escape, 2003, Lithography on paper, 46 x 31 cm, printed by Chris Armijo. Photo By Emma Bell / The Concordian

In contrast, silkscreen printing, or serigraphy, lends itself toward the bright and the graphic. A method of choice for poster artists and activists, this printmaking technique favours boldness. The process involves separating an image into colour layers and turning those layers into stencils. The stencils are then fixed to a stretched silk screen, where the artist will then pass over with a squeegee to transfer the ink onto the paper layer by layer until the image is complete. Pierre Dorian’s 2008 print Stairs aptly demonstrates this technique. The bold lines, solid colours and overall graphic qualities of the staircase are highly characteristic of serigraphy.

Pierre Darian, Stairs, 2008, Silkscreen on paper, 76 x 62 cm, Printed by Mikael Petraccia. Photo by Emma Bell / The Concordian

The discipline of printmaking values the process of creation just as much, if not more, than the final print itself. As you spend some time with the works here, try to notice both the limitations and possibilities of each method and how it complements the subject matter.
Lasting Impressions will remain in Concordia’s Webster library until September 25, 2023.

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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 Exhibit

The Portal to Unity between Nature and Humanity

View of the exhibition Portable Universe: Thought and Splendour of Indigenous Colombia at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière

Collaboration between museums and Indigenous communities offers a step toward a new way of displaying sacred objects.

Thought and Splendour of Indigenous Colombia: Portable Universe is a collaborative exhibition organized by five museums in the United States, Canada, and Colombia in dialogue with the Arhuaco community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Northern Colombia. The active inclusion of the Arhuaco community in this exhibition’s organization intentionally puts forth an indigenous perspective of the world, allowing viewers to witness each object through the lens of the culture from which they came. This decision provides a richer understanding of the intentions behind each piece and creates a cross-cultural dialogue through which knowledge can be equally exchanged. 

The exhibition opens up with a didactic wall text that provides an overview of how the perspective of Indigenous people enriches present-day society through a timeless sensibility. There is no beginning or end for the objects collected here,  for their inherent spirit traverses time and space. Upon entering the gallery, the viewers encounter the “Votive figure (Tunjo)”, which is a sculpture shaped like a man seated in the basket position. Through the gesture of the figure’s connected hands, this piece provides a glimpse into one of the major themes of the exhibition—the circularity and timelessness of indigenous thought. A selection of contemporary artwork at the end of the exhibition rounds out the show by reinforcing the timeless notion of nature as a respected and valued part of humanity.

The curators refused to organize the display according to a linear timeline. This choice encourages the visitors to connect with the pieces’ functional role and the intentions of the creator rather than inserting them into a canonical order. Consequently, the viewer focuses on the lessons embedded in each piece regarding the relationship humans share with nature and their symbiotic roles.

View of the exhibition Portable Universe: Thought and Splendour of Indigenous Colombia at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière

Considering nature as our extended family and respecting it is another recurring theme of the exhibition. The importance of the natural world in Indigenous communities shows through their sacred practices. The exhibition opens a discussion that calls into question the Western view of nature as a resource to use and exploit and encourages viewers to consider the Indigenous view of nature as our shared home that must be respected and protected. 

Each room in the exhibition is curated according to a different theme in order to emphasize an important aspect of the Arhuaco culture. Video projectors, images and soundscapes throughout the exhibition remind visitors of the natural sights and sounds that are significant and sacred in the practices of the Indigenous communities of Colombia. These practices focus on the principles of creation and imitation of natural elements. Video projections serve as extended narratives and insert a sensorial and human element into the gallery space. 

The exhibition is located in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and will be open to the public until October 1st, 2023. 

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Arts Concordia Student Union Exhibit

Shams: Uplifting the voices of Arab artists

Shams Vernissage- Courtesy Photo

The vernissage of FASA’s new exhibition took place last Saturday, March 11, at the Eastern Bloc in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, displaying works in varying mediums from 10 different artists

Shams, the Arabic word for “sun,” seems like the perfect word to describe this exhibition, because it shines the light on the unheard voices of proudly Arabic artists. 

Nesreen Galal is the curator of FASA’s new exhibition. She is FASA’s outreach coordinator and a fourth-year Concordia student double majoring in studio and computation arts.

Galal conceived the idea for Shams after having co-organized many shows for artists of different ethnicities through the CSU. She found that there wasn’t enough representation for Arab people.

“I thought it would be cool to have an opportunity to have fine arts and non fine arts students who identify as Arab to have a space, and focus on marginalized voices as well such as women, queer [people], immigrants, disabled people, and refugees,” she said.

Galal drew initial inspiration from American-Palestinian author Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which explores the west’s depiction of eastern culture. 

“Arabs are perceived in a western-dominant perspective, especially in Canada where its perception is affected by America’s dominant perspective. We’re defined as barbaric or as terrorists or even stereotyped as people in fantasy lands like in Aladdin,” said Galal. 

For this reason, it was necessary to provide Shams as a safe space for the attributed artists. 

Courtesy Photo

Co-creator of furniture workshop Atelier Bon Train Rafaël Khoury displayed an installation in the exhibition, called A lesson between two sculptures. It’s composed of three pedestals: the middle one holds a couple of notebooks containing Arabic and English scribbles, while the other two pedestals each hold a strange sculpture resembling uneven bookshelves composed of shattered marble and walnut wood.

“They are explorations in self-compassion, one of the primary themes of the installation are the exploring of self, reorienting of self, and being allowed to do so,” said Khoury. “The sculptures are a divergence of traditional furniture, and the script is also me trying to get in touch with part of my story, as a child of immigrants, but in my own way.” 

Similar to Khoury, communications alumnus and musician Amira Faradj grew up out of touch with Arab culture despite being raised by Algerian parents. “Because it was always in my household, I felt disdain towards it for some reason. Maybe it was because I wanted to fit in with my peers who were not from that area,” said the musician. “It’s only recently that I’ve come around to explore my identity in a way that feels like mine. I’ve never felt a connection to my country of origin until I realised that I can make that thing my own.” 

Faradj, who DJs as a hobby, presented egypt91 at the expo, which is a 35-minute mix of drum and bass/house music blended with sounds of what the west perceives Arabic music to be. This was accompanied by old footage of Faradj’s father’s trip to Egypt in 1991, collaged with other flamboyant visuals.

Ranime El Morry, a third-year studio arts major, presented the second portrait in their series called Just A Lookalike. The acrylic on canvas is of a mask made of some sort of malleable paper. It represents the unconscious social strategy of autistic masking. 

According to El Morry, who has been diagnosed with medium support needs on the spectrum, autistic masking is a unique process through which people with autism assume a different personality to each person they interact with. 

Courtesy Photo

“It’s very hard to mix different groups of people in the same room, because we’re very different, and a lot of people diagnosed with autism don’t notice that they are masking,” explained El Morry, referring to their artwork. “You wear this paper and it moulds [metaphorically], and it can easily change but it can easily unmold, but it feels heavy.”

Dona Maria Mouaness, who immigrated from Lebanon a year ago in pursuit of studio arts studies at Concordia, created a terracotta bust of an unknown woman with tribal Bedouin face tattoos. “It started out as a self portrait. I wanted it to be more than that, I wanted it to represent women who identify with it or feel any kind of connection to her. She represents the resistant Arab womanhood.” 

The sense of unity is strong in this exhibition. Every artist has a different story and relation with their culture, yet they take strong pride in their identity, regardless of how prevalent it is in their lives.

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Arts Exhibit

Yea I made it up, Yea it’s real: Examining digital culture, social media, and the meme-sphere

"Promise me You'll never unfollow me" by Dayana Matasheva and Edson Niebla Rogil, featured in Yea I made it up, Yea it's real. Courtesy Edson Niebla Rogil

Concordia students and alumni adopt internet aesthetics to explore the human experience in the digital age in new exhibition

On Feb. 17, artists Edson Niebla Rogil and Dayana Matasheva hosted the vernissage for their exhibition Yea I made it up, Yea it’s real out of their shared Plateau studio.

The show featured 12 artists, including Niebla Rogil and Matasheva, whose works address the effects of the internet on the human experience through mediums ranging from AI-generated audio to livestreaming-inspired video compilations.

Courtesy Photo by Edson Niebla Rogil
Courtesy Photo by Edson Niebla Rogil

For Matasheva, who graduated from film production in 2020, the internet represents an aesthetic endeavour. “I think aesthetically, no one is using the visual vernacular of the internet. We are interested in its aesthetics specifically, rather than just its subject matter.”

After noticing a lack of representation of internet subject matter within traditional gallery spaces, Niebla Rogil and Matasheva issued an open call for like-minded artists.

“There’s a really big focus on technology as a medium, but there’s very little about the cultures that are growing online and changing the landscape of how people interact with each other,” said Concordia intermedia major Liz Waterman, whose sensorial TikTok-inspired video projection Doom Scroll was featured in the exhibition.

“I think that it’s shaping culture and psychology in a way that’s really interesting, and we don’t see enough work about it.”

Courtesy Photo by Edson Niebla Rogil
Courtesy Photo by Edson Niebla Rogil

Yea I made it up, Yea it’s real is the first exhibition organized, hosted, and curated by Niebla Rogil and Matasheva, but the pair have ambitions to move future exhibitions out of their studio into larger spaces, and to continue to host their networking event The Net Worker.

“It’s a recurring event where people shamelessly network and there’s no other purpose to it,” explains Matasheva. “People come together, exchange DIY business cards, they wear business attire and everything. It’s a little bit performative, but it actually is serving a purpose for artists.”

Information about upcoming exhibitions, networking events and more can be found on Niebla Rogil and Matasheva’s Instagram profiles.

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Arts Exhibit

[espace variable | placeholder]: experience art in a post-pandemic flux

La Centrale - Courtesy Photos

Concordia students and alumni open a new online art exhibit in regards to adapting to a world affected by COVID-19

La Centrale galerie Powerhouse hosted the vernissage of their new exhibit [espace variable | placeholder] on the evening of Feb. 2. The online gallery was created, in part, as a statement that the world of art has shifted to the internet. 

It was created out of inspiration from a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg: the third place. Third places are the spaces where people can spend time in between their first place (home) and second place (work). As of recently, the world’s third place is the internet.

The exhibit is divided into four categories: Read, Observe, Listen, and Interact. 

La Centrale Courtesy Photo

Read, the first category presents texts reflecting artists’ experiences involving themes pertaining to third places, place-making, technological presence, and artistic subversion. 

Observe, the second category, displays the interdisciplinary approach to the concept of placeholding. 

Listen, the third category, involves audible artwork alluding to memory, transmission and reciprocity. 

La Centrale Courtesy Photo

Interact, the last, is a space which provides literature for readers to further their understanding and research of third places.

This exhibit explores navigation through third places as well as artists’ “(re)telling” of stories about finding a voice, or making a place, of those who have been demeaned by racial injustice.

One of the installations at the vernissage was from artist-in-residence rudi aker of the Byte-sized Sound Creation Residency. “This work, a bird in the hand, is what feels most appropriate to share with a larger public from those recorded conversations,” explains aker in their artist statement. The audio piece is “a move to safeguard our personal and familial histories from the often prying and exploitative consumption of Indigenous oral histories.”

La Centrale Courtesy Photo

My Little thingliness (SCRUB-A-DUB-DUB-BEBOP), another creation presented at the vernissage, is a spoken-word/sound immersion performance written and performed by Faith Paré. The piece thrashes you into the world of generational forced labour and abuse that Black women succumb to in order to survive white supremacist society. Because of this, Black women of today have the choice and opportunity to work with their minds instead of their hands.

Art history and studio arts major at Concordia India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner was the Artistic and Community Alliances Coordinator of [espace variable | placeholder] for some time. Through La Centrale, Upshaw-Ruffner met the Publications and Communications Coordinator Lital Khaikin.

During the creative progress of [espace variable | placeholder], the two developers contacted Paré, who Upshaw-Ruffner had discovered through a project she did at Concordia. Paré knew rudi aker through a class that they took together as well. The [espace variable | placeholder] ex-coordinator met rudi aker through a class on indigenous curatorial methodologies they had together. It goes to show that networking at school is important!

If you want to frequent an art exhibit but hate walking, you can now experience it from your own home. Click here. To access La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse’s website, Click here.

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Arts Exhibit

Exhibition review: Montreal printmaking artist’s life path

Death of the Cyclist - Photo by Jiawei HONG

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts displays 30 remarkable artworks from Albert Dumouchel, representing the evolution of his art style throughout his career

“Printing remains a simple, Austere Language– As I have often said, it’s like chamber music” – Albert Dumouchel.

Albert Dumouchel (1916-71) was a Montreal printmaking artist. He met London artist James Lowe in 1940, which inspired the start of his printmaking career.

An exhibition in honour of the late artist is located on the second floor of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, surrounded by white walls. The room is lit in a warm tone, dimmer than the lobby but matches the tone of the artist’s featured works. This exhibition displays 30 of his prints from the 1940s to the 1960s. His printmaking has been influenced by the development of art in many other countries.

In 1942, Dumouchel’s artwork “Pietà” marked the beginning of his journey. Unlike the traditional drypoint technique, in which an image is drawn on the plate with a sharp needle-like tool. Dumouchel decided to carve his images into a sheet of transparent plastic. “Pietà” demonstrated a picture of the Virgin Mary mourning the death of her son. 

Although the overall lines of this piece are rough, the painted appearance on Mary’s face expresses strong emotions. The sharp white shapes in the background form a strong contrast with the surrounding dark round shapes, enhancing the viewer’s visual senses. His spiritual expression laid the groundwork for the later transformation of his artistic style.

In the late 1940s, Dumouchel turned towards surrealism, expressing external reality through his own psychological and poetic imagination. In “The Banners in the Night,” 1958, he used etching to show the technical improvement. Each line in the work flows naturally, twisting together to create the changeable forms of the wind.

In 1965, with the ascent of the Pop Art movement in North America, Dumouchel returned to figurative form in 1965. One remarkable technique he used was lithography. This technique was used in his piece “La mort de la cycliste” (The Death of the Cyclist), presenting his art in a completely new way.

Dumouchel returned to carving, making woodcuts late in his career, like his piece called “L’Horrible chat des neiges” (The Horrible Snow Cat).The penetrating gaze of the cat is what makes the work memorable. Referring to his earlier works, he has a talent of using minimal backgrounds to enhance the expression of the main subject’s manner.

Throughout this artist’s experience in printmaking, much of his inspiration has come from other cultures. “When I think of this artist, or any other artist, I would just think of his expression of art,” says one of the visitors. “Anything could be the inspiration, like what you learned and what you experienced.”

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Arts Exhibit

Habitat Sonore — an immersive audio experience at PHI Centre

Habitat Sonore Exhibit at Phi Centre - Courtesy by Julien GRIMARD

Old Montreal’s avant-garde multipurpose arts and culture venue invites you to “tune out the everyday noise and lose yourself in Montréal’s new immersive listening room” until Jan. 29

Habitat Sonore, which “consists of a 16 speaker multichannel array powered by a high-end JBL pre-processor,” has a daily rotation of soundtracks played in its singular room. On the first day, I listened to 64 minutes of a neo-classical piano soundtrack by Canadian platinum pianist Alexandra Strélinski. 

As I was led down a neat concrete basement staircase, through a purple printed door and finally past a black felt curtain at the end of a dim carpeted hallway, I was instructed to throw myself onto any cushy bean bag chair of my choosing. I waited in a dark soundproofed room solely lit by magenta LED strips, which pulsated a hypnotising glow scaling the chamber horizontally. An ambient melody surrounded and greeted me — one I would put on to meditate. Soon enough, I was sent to a different universe.

Habitat Sonore Exhibit at Phi Centre – Courtesy by Julien GRIMARD

Radiating from every corner of the chamber was music that would be a pleasure to have alongside while studying, meditating or falling asleep: pure tranquillity and serenity. It was music that you could find in a cute short student film that pays homage to Wes Anderson. 

Inscape by Strélinski was the first album to be played. Each song brought a different mood. Sometimes cheeky, pensive, desolate, but never disruptive. 

Pianoscope was the second album of hers played through, and it gave pondering 19th century steam-punk villain vibes. Restful nonetheless.

The next day I listened to the second program of three, which consisted of a few different works each by a plethora of artists, totaling nearly an hour. 

Better in the Shade by Polaris Music Award winner Patrick Watson and his bandmate Mishka Stein. The alternative EP felt — in the best way I could put it — sort of low-fi psychedelic experimental. The duo of ASMR vocals and wispy percussion was the seed for melancholy throughout the playthrough. 

Next was a meditative piece by Debbie Doe called Theatre of Dreams. It was a cacophony of sounds traveling from one end of the room to the other, all blending together forming a narrative that one can only interpret using their own imagination. From mystical chiming to macabre droning, and even a demonic cackle, the piece satisfied all my expectations when walking into a sound room such as this. 

Finally, Grammy-winning mixer James Benjamin’s Rainforest enchanted me and cleansed me of all of my worries for the duration of its runtime. The room was transported deep into an unknown jungle, with creatures chirping and predators hunting. Sometimes I could hear a leaf crunching in front of me, or the passing over of a distant airplane, maybe a gunshot from behind, maybe the howling of a monkey to the left of me. For the most part, it was the most therapeutic lullabying experience I could imagine. Rain hitting the rooftop back at home would be of no match to it. 

A great experience, and incredibly relaxing. If I could sit in that beanbag chair until Jan. 29, I would.

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