EXHIBITION: SEPT 13 - 19, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: N/A
DUO
JULIE KELLER
KATE RUSKO
Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
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Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
Julie Keller and Kate Rusko, [untitled], 1998.
In order to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Humanities Doctoral Programme at Concordia University, current PhD students and graduates of the programme are presenting a curated group exhibition of their recent studio work. The Humanities Doctoral Programme encourages the development of innovative research at the doctoral level which crosses disciplinary boundaries.
Meredith Browne, Grayson Cooke, Jim Drobnick, Jennifer Fisher, Cynthia Hammond, Katja MacLeod Kessin and Kat O Brien are comitted to interdisciplinary academic research and fine art practice. Each participant s studio production is integrally tied to his or her academic investigations in such diverse fields as Art History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Film Studies, History of Medicine, German Studies and Literature. The result of those efforts is the exhibition (Doctorings: Studio Work Informed by Interdisciplinary Scholarship) which includes interactive and sound installations, video, web site design, and painting installation. The show runs September 20-26. In lieu of a vernissage all are welcome to attend the. . .
closing event
3-6pm Saturday, September 26
Presented in Conjuction with Celebrations for the 25th Anniversary of the Humanities Doctoral Programme.
EXHIBITION: SEPT 20 - 26, 1998
CLOSING RECEPTION: SEPT 26
CURATION
MEREDITH BROWNE
KATJA MCLEOD KESSIN
GROUP
MEREDITH BROWNE
GRAYSON COOKE
JIM DROBNICK & JENNIFER FISHER
CYNTHIA HAMMOND
KATJA MACLEAOD KESSIN
KAT O’BRIEN
Cynthia Hammond, Changeable Winds, 1998. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views
Katja MacLeod Kessin, Relations, 1998.
Kathleen O’Brien, GAOL/GAOL: Echoes of Kilmainham, 1998.
Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, CounterPoses, 1998.
(Slide 1)
Cynthia Hammond
Changeable Winds
1998
Both angels and colonizers address others with the phrase “do not be afraid”. In this piece, these words were printed repeatedly over white cotton, which billows over a globe of the colonial world. Both wings of hope and sails of fear, Changeable winds is intended as crossroads between the sometimes contradictory, sometimes collaborative discourses of colonialism and divine word, or logos.
(Slide 2)Katja MacLeod Kessin
Relations
1998
‘Formerly, there was a reduction from text to image. Today there is amplification from the one to the other’. (Roland Barthes). Relations is an excerpt from the painting installation ‘Grim Reaper’, 1998. The work combines contemporary art with childhood imagery, traditional methods of art production (painting) with modern technology (laser printing) and image with text in unexpected, often disturbing ways: ‘Neither the text nor the images by themselves generate the (black) humor. Rather, humor is created through the disjunction of image and text.’ (Nina Felshin)
Cynthia Hammond
Changeable Winds
1998
Both angels and colonizers address others with the phrase “do not be afraid”. In this piece, these words were printed repeatedly over white cotton, which billows over a globe of the colonial world. Both wings of hope and sails of fear, Changeable winds is intended as crossroads between the sometimes contradictory, sometimes collaborative discourses of colonialism and divine word, or logos.
(Slide 2)Katja MacLeod Kessin
Relations
1998
‘Formerly, there was a reduction from text to image. Today there is amplification from the one to the other’. (Roland Barthes). Relations is an excerpt from the painting installation ‘Grim Reaper’, 1998. The work combines contemporary art with childhood imagery, traditional methods of art production (painting) with modern technology (laser printing) and image with text in unexpected, often disturbing ways: ‘Neither the text nor the images by themselves generate the (black) humor. Rather, humor is created through the disjunction of image and text.’ (Nina Felshin)
Kathleen O’Brien
GAOL/GAOL: Echoes of Kilmainham
1998
Featuring a five-foot wire mesh tongue-within-a-tongue, this sound and text installation is a companion to O’Brien’s seven-tongue installation currently exhibiting at Kilmainham Gaol and Museum in Dublin, Ireland. Both works frame two cognate words GAOL/GAOL, which have sharply different meanings in the Irish and English languages, to commemorate the Gaol’s 200-year role in Irish history and the sharp decline in use of the Irish language in Ireland and Canada.
(Slide 4)
Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher
CounterPoses
1998
This installation features a video-catalogue of CounterPoses, an exhibition-event that took place last May in Montreal. Presented by Display Cult (Drobnick and Fisher’s curatorial collaboration) and galerie Oboro, it featured 12 contemporary tableaux vivants or living pictures. During the three day performance period, the artists incorporated living people in elaborate site-specific installations. The artists include: Stephanie Beaudoin, Tarin Chaplin, Colette, Kim Dawn and Christof Migone, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Rachel Echenberg, Nathalie Grimard, Louise Liliefeldt, Christine Martin, David McFarlane, The Other Theatre and Kathryn Walter.
GAOL/GAOL: Echoes of Kilmainham
1998
Featuring a five-foot wire mesh tongue-within-a-tongue, this sound and text installation is a companion to O’Brien’s seven-tongue installation currently exhibiting at Kilmainham Gaol and Museum in Dublin, Ireland. Both works frame two cognate words GAOL/GAOL, which have sharply different meanings in the Irish and English languages, to commemorate the Gaol’s 200-year role in Irish history and the sharp decline in use of the Irish language in Ireland and Canada.
(Slide 4)
Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher
CounterPoses
1998
This installation features a video-catalogue of CounterPoses, an exhibition-event that took place last May in Montreal. Presented by Display Cult (Drobnick and Fisher’s curatorial collaboration) and galerie Oboro, it featured 12 contemporary tableaux vivants or living pictures. During the three day performance period, the artists incorporated living people in elaborate site-specific installations. The artists include: Stephanie Beaudoin, Tarin Chaplin, Colette, Kim Dawn and Christof Migone, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Rachel Echenberg, Nathalie Grimard, Louise Liliefeldt, Christine Martin, David McFarlane, The Other Theatre and Kathryn Walter.
(Below)
Meredith Browne
Subject: Control
1998
The 2x2 inch Lamprey grid was invented to provide a consistent ground for anthropological images. Standing in front of this grid the viewer is framed as the test subject juxtaposed against the carte-de-visite type images of the control group.
Documentation unavailable.
Grayson Cooke
Cyborg Apocalypse
1998
The Cyborg Apocalypse is an online forum for the various photographic academic and digital projects I move through as my ambiguously catastrophic love affair with technology progresses. The use of the word ‘apocalypse’ is therefore ironic, for this project is really a catalogue not of technological endings, but of mutations; the recalibration of defunct systems, newer and stranger beginnings.
Meredith Browne
Subject: Control
1998
The 2x2 inch Lamprey grid was invented to provide a consistent ground for anthropological images. Standing in front of this grid the viewer is framed as the test subject juxtaposed against the carte-de-visite type images of the control group.
Documentation unavailable.
Grayson Cooke
Cyborg Apocalypse
1998
The Cyborg Apocalypse is an online forum for the various photographic academic and digital projects I move through as my ambiguously catastrophic love affair with technology progresses. The use of the word ‘apocalypse’ is therefore ironic, for this project is really a catalogue not of technological endings, but of mutations; the recalibration of defunct systems, newer and stranger beginnings.
THE LINK
September 22, 1998
by Karen Guttman
The humanities doctoral program is celebrating its 25th anniversary with its presentation of “Doctorings”. The exhibition’s title refers to artists playing or “doctoring” with the notion of truth and boundaries. It is a tongue in cheek, oh-painting installation embodying the interdisciplinary concept, are to be presented. One of the curators of the event, along with Meredith Browne, is Katja Macleod Kessin, a Ph.D student in the humanities doctoral programme.
Meeting Katja and discussing her work for the upcoming “Doctorings” exhibition blew me away. Her ideas renewed my excitement about the possibilities of art and how it has the power to change and provoke that language doesn’t. Kessin talks enthusiastically about the humanities doctoral program which encourages interdisciplinary research and development. A Ph.D candidate will have three areas of study and up to three advisors. One major and one minor must be focused in Liberal Arts and the other minor can be studio art. This is significant in that an exhibition is considered part of the body of work, even though a student still must defend a traditional written academic thesis to graduate. Doctorate programs for the fine arts are few and Kessin feels the programme will boost respect for fine arts in the area of academia.
Kessin’s three areas of focus are German studies, art history, and studio art. She was born in Germany, and even though she responded in our interview in flawless English, she says she struggles in her second language. This reinforces her feelings of language not always being the clearest way to express issues. Her work “Relations,” an excerpt from a larger painting installation “Grim Reaper,” addresses language as she superimposes text on to pictures she drew as a child in post-W.W.II Germany. Katja jokes that this installation has been in process for about forty years, from the time she was five to now.
In a drawing that her mother labeled Sandmannchen,five year old Katja illustrates the German myth of the Sandman. Traditionally, he is a little man who visits children at bedtime and softly drops sand in their eyes to make them sleepy. Her Sandman seems to be dropping sharp objects and the child is wide-eyed and tense in her bed. Katja superimposes the word Kristallnact (night of glass breaking). This is the night from November 9 to 10 in 1938 when Jewish property was vandalized and destroyed. That night was the decisive beginning to the third Reich’s persecution of Jews.
Kessin’s intensity of image and text refer to the heavy silence in Germany and German’s past atrocities. As a young girl, no one taught Katja about the war, but she was very conscious of this shame and silence growing up. She feels her childhood drawings surface this terror and confusion.
There is still a taboo in Germany nowadays on talking about the war, and Katja sees fine art as a way to break it. She feels that if Germans don’t find a way to discuss their past, the guilt and resentment will eventually erupt into anger and aggression.
EXHIBIT MISREPRESENTED
THE LINK
September 25, 1998
Letter to the Editor
As co-curators of the exhibit “Doctorings” we are responding to the article “Playing Doctors”, which appeared in the ‘Link’ on September 22nd (page 7). Unfortunately it grossly misrepresents what the exhibition stands for. To begin with, the article’s subtitle reads ‘Exhibit pokes fun at the humanities’. In fact, the exhibit is a celebration of their Humanities Doctoral Programme and its 25th year of existence at Concordia University.
The article further states that the exhibition is a ‘tongue in cheek, oh just bit snarky, jab at the authority of degrees earned through the programme’. In fact, both curators of and artists in the exhibition are or were students in the programme and are fully supportive of it. They clearly do not wish to discount the degrees they are working towards in the Humanities Programme.
There are other mistakes in the article’s closing paragraph: Although there will be a wine and food reception following a lecture and panel discussion organized by the Humanities Programme, there will be absolutely no ‘free beer bash’ for attendants. As co-curators of the exhibitions and students in the programme we wish to distance ourselves from the above statements.
Having spoken to the author of the article we were informed that her piece was altered by the editors’ intervention. Regardless of who is responsible, obviously some gross contradictions and misrepresentations occured in the writing and editing process of ‘Playing Doctors’. We believe that all those who worked so hard on putting ‘Doctorings’ together deserve a written clarification and apology.
Meredith Browne
and Katja MacLeod Kessin
Meredith Browne, Subject: Control, 1998. Click to expand the image
EXHIBITION: OCT 5 - 10, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: OCT6
SOLO
MICHELLE BUSH
Michelle Bush, Swing, 1998.
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Michelle Bush, Swing, 1998.
Michelle Bush, Swing, 1998.
Michelle Bush, Swing, 1998.
EXHIBITION: OCT 18 - 24, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: N/A
DUO
MARIE ROBITAILLE
PASCALE FLEURY
Marie Robitaille and Pascale Fleury, [untitled], 1998.
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Marie Robitaille and Pascale Fleury, [untitled], 1998.
Marie Robitaille and Pascale Fleury, [untitled], 1998.
EXHIBITION: NOV 1 - 7, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: N/A
DUO
DAVID LAFRANCE
TIMOTHY MCEVENUE
David LaFrance and Timothy McEvenue, [untitled], 1998.
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David LaFrance and Timothy McEvenue, [untitled], 1998.
David LaFrance and Timothy McEvenue, [untitled], 1998.
EXHIBITION: NOV 8 - 14, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: N/A
CURATION
REBECCA WATT
GROUP
CHRIS READY ET AL.
Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
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Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
BOOKS MAKE BETTER FRIENDS
by Leanne Ashworth and Beth Porteous
Maybe the art world is elitist and works to alienate all but a small group of well educated people. Maybe it’s the last world 99% of the population wants to explore because it’s about as engaging as an infomercial and says little or nothing about what is going on with our lives. Maybe what we need is more interactive spaces for people from within the art world and those on the outside of galleryland to express whatever it is that they (we) think is important. Access to public space isn’t an issue that’s dealt with at most VAV gallery shows.
The show at the VAV from November 8-14, called Bound, is trying to challenge the unwritten rules of the gallery. To gather the more than 50 books that are in Bound, the group of students organizing the show put up posters around the school looking for any sort of book art to be submitted to them. It was an open call with no jury because no one wanted to make the decision that one book was good and that another wasn t. It s going to be left up to whoever walks into the show and looks through the pages of the books.
The VAV is going to be transformed into a reading friendly space with couches an comfy chairs. Bound takes advantage of the gallery’s mandate, challenging the traditionally passive art/viewer relationship.
The gallery wants more interactive and engaging uses of gallery space and is looking for proposals from any student, not just those enrolled in Fine Arts. During the show the space will be used for book artist discussions and skill sharing workshops on 3 types of bookbinding.
The Vernissage for Bound is at 8pm on Tuesday and it promises DJs and some performance art. Just imagine how impressed your prof will be when you hand in your hand-bound economics paper.
Bound runs from November 8th to 14th at the VAV Gallery, 1395 Rene Levesque West.
Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
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Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
Chris Ready Et Al., curated by Rebecca Watt, Bound: Books Make Better Friends, 1998.
EXHIBITION: DEC 6 - 12, 1998
OPENING RECEPTION: N/A
DUO
MELODIE DAVIS
YUANG ZHANG
Melodie Davis and Yuang Zhang, [untitled], 1998.
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Melodie Davis and Yuang Zhang, [untitled], 1998.
Melodie Davis and Yuang Zhang, [untitled], 1998.
Melodie Davis and Yuang Zhang, [untitled], 1998.
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EXHIBITION: JAN 4 - 9, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: JAN 8
DUO
BRIGITTE ARCHAMBAULT
CLAUDIA BALTHAZAR
Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
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Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
Brigitte Archambault and Claudia Balthazar, Dialogues, 1999.
EXHIBITION: JAN 24 - 30, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: JAN 26
DUO
JESSICA AVER
ZEV TIEFENBACH
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
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Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
Jessica Aver and Zev Tiefenbach, The Past is a Cup of Tea and a Roadsign, 1999.
EXHIBITION: JAN 31 - FEB 6, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: FEB 2
DUO
ORESTES GREDIAGA
JON MITCHELL
EXHIBITION: MAR 3 - 31, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: MAR 23
DUO
LARISSA FASSLER
BARBARA PROKOP
EXHIBITION: MAY 10 - 15, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: MAY 11
GROUP
N/A
EXHIBITION: JUNE 21 - 28, 1999
OPENING RECEPTION: JUNE 21
DUO
BILINA VELKOVA
MICHELLE BUSH