This post will contain the highlights from exhibitions from March 2009 – September 22nd 2010
Barbara Astma, Wonderland Series
September 9 2009 - February 13 2010
There are endless possibilities for narratives within found objects. Astman is fascinated with postcards acting as syntheses between personal memories and a constructed reality. In “On Photography,” Susan Sontag speaks of motives of collecting images from which stories flourish: “To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movie and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store”. Postcards represent a quintessential moment where photography becomes object.
Using digital techniques to position the postcards within negative space, Astman captures the feeling of flipping through stacks; harnessing a tension between motion and stillness. The body of work is about the relationship between the real and the artificial, and how experience can occur through artificial representation of the real.
The idea of collecting is significant, as a collection is a form of record in one’s life. As a child, postcards and encyclopedias made Astman realize there was a larger world outside of her neighborhood. She would stare at the postcard long enough to imagine herself being there, preferring the postcard version of reality. Astman is most interested in the postcards that represent a naive world void of worldly problems.
Pre-digital postcards present an intersection of photography, printmaking, drawing and painting with their heavily re-worked and refined imagery. Photographing these postcards re-enforces the multitude of reproductions that make up popular culture, and the complex and involved relationship contemporary culture has with the past.
Françoise Sullivan -
New Works, Song Series
April 21 2010 - August 10 2010
Mark-making is one of the most essential and elemental acts that an artist may do. The act of making the mark, in Françoise Sullivan’s hand, translates into works that are rich in the poetic gesture and rhythms that are an indispensable part of her vocabulary, regardless of the medium. Her repetitive marks read as the rhythm of breathing, like the trace of a heartbeat across a page, or footsteps across a landscape. In the 1940s, Sullivan was a founding member of the group of artists known as “les Automatistes”. This group consisted of artists from many disciplines: painting, dancing, theatre and set design, poetry, and so on. United by their interest in automatism, the “Automatistes”, far from being a little band of innovators from Québec, had a profound impact on the socio-cultural fabric of Canada, fundamentally shaping who we are now as Canadians.
