La Centrale – The Concordian

You are here: Tania Lara’s “Autogéographies”

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.

Creation of an Ethereal World is an exhibition that will challenge your perception and make you think

Esther Calixte-Bea is one of the rising stars of Montreal’s art scene, and her most recent exhibition, also her solo debut, demonstrates that.

Step into La Centrale, located at 4296 St. Laurent Blvd., and you’ll find a universe of Calixte-Bea’s design. The exhibition, featuring artwork that Calixte-Bea created in the last two years, is truly multidisciplinary, featuring paintings, a repurposed table, writings, painted photo collages, and sculptures made from mannequins. It’s titled Creation of an Ethereal World, curated by Cécilia Bracmort.

La Centrale, where the exhibition is being held until October 28, 2021, is an artist-run space, and for decades has been the city’s sole feminist gallery. This makes it a fitting choice to house the work of an artist and activist like Calixte-Bea.

Why? She is of Haitian and Ivorian descent and her work often depicts Black women in a range of shapes, sizes and hairy states. This is part of what makes her work so distinct. How many painters can you name that focus on hairy women? Women with lots of leg hair, chest hair, and arm hair? Female body hair is still an incredibly taboo topic, and Calixte-Bea’s work is a positive (and pretty!) step towards trying to rectify that.

“I had discovered my style by the end of 2018, and had become a body hair activist in 2019, and I knew that I wanted to paint, and normalize female body hair in my art practice,” explained Calixte-Bea to The Concordian.

She is a recent graduate of Concordia’s Fine Arts program. She said that after the many group shows of her undergrad she “felt ready to have [her] first solo exhibition.”

The body hair activist appeared on the cover of Glamour UK in January 2021, making her the first woman with visible chest hair to do so. Calixte-Bea’s success today is partially due to her 2019 Lavender Project, a series of self-portraits, paired with poetry and writing which explored topics like self love, Eurocentric beauty standards, and female body hair. This project gaining significant public recognition was partially what led to Calixte-Bea’s (continuing) rise as an artist and activist.

Creation of an Ethereal World, which debuted at La Centrale on September 23, 2021, also features a unique exhibition text. It’s standard for the artist to write a short statement about their work and inspirations, and for the curator to then supplement it with commentary about the exhibition as a whole.

However, Calixte-Bea is not just any artist. Creation of an Ethereal World has an exhibition text that is unlike most you’ll come across, contained in a booklet with a bright lime green cover, printed in both English and French. Calixte-Bea was inspired to create an imaginary tribe, as represented in the artwork in Creation of an Ethereal World. The tribe (partially inspired by Calixte-Bea’s heritage belonging to the Wè tribe in Côte d’Ivoire) is called Fyète Souhou-te and they embrace female body hair. The text also contains the tribe’s instructions on important cultural information, like how to become a chief.

“I knew that I wanted to create a whole tribe, a world that was living within this world. Oftentimes when we talk about tribes we talk about them in the past, so I wanted to create a whole tribe of women that celebrate their body hair, embrace themselves and embrace their uniqueness,” explained the artist.

The paintings are all acrylic. The overall colour scheme is both bright and soft, with sunset tones like orange, pink and blue jumping out throughout the room. Bright green Astroturf grass was installed for the exhibition, adding to the pleasantly surreal feeling: think Candyland, but elevated. “I always loved using so many colours, I just love [them] and colourful things like flowers. That really comes through in my work, [plus] me growing up watching a lot of colourful cartoons,” she noted.

One of the most striking paintings in the exhibit is titled My White Barbie, 2020, which features a Barbie doll being squeezed by a hand, attached to a close-up of a woman’s torso in the background. Rich brown and cherry blossom pink tones demand attention from the viewer. “[It’s] a really personal work,” said Calixte-Bea, who explained that it was only when she was out of her childhood and teen years that she realized the full, negative extent that Eurocentric beauty standards had on her. “Growing up, you want to be the pretty one, the desirable one, but there was no representation for me,” she continued.

“Someone asked me in class why I paint Black people. It’s a funny question that people tend to ask Black artists. [White artists] don’t really get asked, why do you paint white people?” noted Calixte-Bea. “You have to paint yourself, you already don’t see yourself represented in art spaces or the media, then obviously you need to create that representation and make the difference that is needed in the world.”

Photograph courtesy of Kimura Byol