centre d'artistes.artist run centre
Curated by Daniel Barrow
Performance : April 21, 7pm
Exhibition : April 21 to 27
When I was asked last year to be Concordia’s Visiting Artist in Residence and teach a drawing class of my own design, my first impulse was to model and structure the class after my favorite drawing class from my own undergraduate degree. It was 15 years ago that Professor Sharon Alward, my favorite teacher from the University of Manitoba, divided her class into 4 chapters each addressing a broad theme: Sex, Love, Death and God. I remember very few specifics about the class - only that it was my favorite and that Professor Alward had cast a spell, allowing each of us to feel like our work fit into an undisputed history that addressed a universal audience. But as I began my own “universal themes and drawing” class, the realization that I am not especially acquainted with sex, love, death or god dawned upon me with enormous humility. Gradually, I became more comfortable with my role as a teacher and relieved when the talented students began to lead their own deep investigations for themselves and steer the education of the class.
The work presented in HEIRESS emerged very organically out of our class under the umbrella of the theme of one of the broad chapter headings. The three artists each created projection performances/slide shows that blended their respective cultural and family heritage with politics, archival images, personal memoir and fantasy in an effort to explain our present predicaments and gauge the temperature of the future.
Emma Kate Guimond came to my class with a background in contemporary dance and used her body to perform in dense, cartoon, projected vignettes. Guimond first presented what kinda face mamma? under the umbrella theme of “Love”. In this multi-layered piece, Guimond weaves various Goddess myths from her personal reservoir of experience (like the story of her allergic reaction to her mother’s milk) with those channeled from the collective unconscious.
In Northern Onterrible, Kerri Flannigan uses a projector to skillfully shift between a bittersweet coming of age tale, educational folk history and a sordid and awkward documentary. Originally presented at our “Death” critique, Flannigan’s monologue is inspired by her childhood passage between a half dozen Northern Ontario homes. The artist collages a portrait of her family’s daunting passage to and from Canada in the 1930s and exposes the mythological foundations of the idyllic small town and the concept of “home”.
Like Flannigan, Kandis Friesen’s live slideshow lecture is simultaneously a family album, a research paper, an archival documentary, and a reflection on death. Friesen questions her various, experiential interpretations of death and dying: the death of a Manitoban neighbourhood through gentrification, the loss of a homeland and refugee living, memorial and migration, lost cemeteries, physical trauma, healing, and the process of mourning. Death: The Architecture Of Dying and The Geography Of Loss is an attentive and generous meditation on nostalgia and loss from the perspective of an artist who desperately wants to effect positive social change.
Each of the artists in this exhibition has expanded upon her original performance work to create an installation for the articule gallery. I am honoured to introduce these three emerging artists to a Montreal audience. I am certain that this will be an important addition to articule’s program – one that will have an impact and be remembered.
Text by Daniel Barrow
Daniel Barrow
Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Daniel Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s 2009 TBA festival, and the British Film Institute (London). Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.
Emma-Kate Guimond
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Emma-Kate Guimond is a Montreal-based artist whose work interweaves performance, drawing, and video. A graduate of Concordia’s Contemporary Dance department, her practice investigates poetic sensations as body politics. Guimond's chosen materials are organic objects, fibres, bodies, fluids, landscape, sound, line and light. She works largely in collaboration with the WIVES collective, creating overhead projection and movement-based experimental theatrical works. Guimond has performed at multiple music, theatre and gallery venues throughout Montreal, and most recently presented SeaFoamBlue at the Rhubarb Festival in Toronto.
Kerri Flannigan
Originally from Deep River, Ontario, Kerri Flannigan currently lives in Montreal. Through drawing, writing, projection, and installation, Flannigan explores methods of experimental narrative and documentary. Grounded in both personal history and in-depth research, her work examines the sordid histories of small towns, coming of age memoirs, and family histories. In 2011, the second issue of her collaborative zine Nailbiter won Best English Zine at the Expozine Awards. Flannigan was recently awarded a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec to produce a book of bittersweet stories about northern Ontario. She is currently producing an animation for the Toronto Animated Image Society’s Helen Hill memorial residency.
Kerri Flannigan thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its support.
Kandis Friesen
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kandis Friesen is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal, since 2000. Working with sound, video, drawing, and installation, her practice looks at language and translation, sites of national and cultural identity, and the functionings of memory and the collective archive. Her work has been shown across Canada and internationally, and her video works are distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), an artist-run centre in Montreal. Among many projects, she is currently working on the Mennonite Video Archive Project, a collaborative collection of work responding to unedited and untranslated footage of a documentary that was never made, found on the dark shelves of a Mennonite archive in the summer of 2010.