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Friday morning, April 1st, The Art Collective will be doing a curatorial session. We will review numerous drawings made over the last few months and decide which ones we think should be identified as "worth showing". Why not come by and take a look?
Everyone invited. VA building, corner of René-Lévesque and Crescent, room 315 (or 313), from 10h00 'till 13h00.
Drawing food was on the menu at Montreal's McGill University on March 15, 2005, when The Art Collective led an Interactive Drawing day as part of Concordia University's Art Matters festival. Check out images from the event in our Photos section. McGill's Midnight Kitchen, a collectively operated food-serving organization, co-sponsored the event and served tasty vegan dishes to all participants. To read a McGill Daily story about Midnight Kitchen, please click here: Midnight Kitchen
The Daily described the Interactive Drawing day as a chance for McGill students to take advantage of Concordia's "vibrant arts community." Read the article: McGill Daily story
Tuesday March 15, 2005, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.: The Collective presents an Interactive Drawing project at McGill University, that is part of Concordia University's Art Matters festival. Students from the two universities will work together on drawings and put up their pieces on The Collective's Interactive Wall. Concordia art students and McGill art history students are expected to be particularly interested in this event, as well as alumni of Concordia Fine Arts and McGill's Art History department.
The event is being co-sponsored by McGill's Midnight Kitchen, a collectively run food service which is similar to Concordia's Peoples Potato.
The event is in Room 302 of the William Shatner University Centre, at 3480 McTavish St., on the west side of McGill's campus, between Sherbrooke St. and Docteur-Penfield. McGill metro station. Lunch is served from 12:30 to 2. The meal is vegan and by donation, and the suggested donation is $2.
Don't miss The Art Collective's new show, Bestiary and Babies, which opens Friday March 11, 2005, from 6 to 10 p.m. at the high-profile Mezzanine space on the second floor of the main Hall building on Concordia University's downtown Montreal campus, at 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. (Go up the escalator from the main lobby and you've arrived.)
Come and make your mark on our Interactive Wall Project No. 2, where you can start a drawing and put it up on the wall or do a collaborative piece with another artist. Or just pick up some drawing tools and work on the pieces already up on the wall. You can also become a self-appointed curator and rearrange work on the wall to reflect your vision of what art should look like. There's even an "I Curator" button for you to put on if you want.
Come along and start a collaborative art piece and get to know some of the talented Fine Arts students, alumni and professional artists who will be at this special event.
The Concordia Alumni Association's Fine Arts Chapter, which is co-sponsoring this special alumni/student Art Matters event, has sent invitations to several thousand alumni in Montreal and Ottawa to come and participate in this ground-breaking festival event. It's co-ordinated by The Art Collective, which is open to Fine Arts students, alumni and professional artists.
The Interactive Wall project will also be active from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday March 14 and Wednesday March 16.
On Tuesday, March 15, there is a special Interactive Wall project at McGill University (see details in previous news item). On Friday March 18, 2005, we have a similar event at Universite du Quebec a Montreal, at the Cafe des Arts, Room J-6170, 405 Ste. Catherine St. E., on the 6th floor near the Visual Arts studios. Metro Berri-UQAM. Bilingual animators will be on hand.
The Collective's latest show was co-curated by artists François Morelli and Holly King, both veterans of many Canada Council juries. To find out more about the co-curators, please click on "Continue Reading" just below.
François Morelli
François Morelli is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes drawing, sculpture and performance. Over his 20-year career, he has developed a distinctive formal visual vocabulary in art that explores the body - its representation, its history and its relationship to space through architecture. Morelli has traditionally concerned himself with the interaction of bodies and memory in space addressing issues surrounding the body's relationship to the environment, architecture and the self.
The installation Web toile portable reveals how he has extended the anthropomorphic element that permeated his earlier sculpture production to the implicit conditions of "being-in-space." The structure is composed of a series of circular woven and expanded metal wires in the form of large-brimmed hats stacked upon one another. Oscillating between a bizarre abstract sculpture and something identifiably functional, they are also proposals for sculptures in city parks and urban spaces. Originally, Morelli wore one of these hat sculptures and walked the streets of Montreal with it on. In the accompanying exhibition at Christianne Chassay Gallery in Montreal, viewers were also invited to don a hat and wear it. More than suggesting the implicit conditions of being in space and how we physically feel in relation to the room with the hat on, Morelli's concerns also address a broader culturally based body politic. Morelli is interested not only in the articulation of physical form but also the entwinement of desire to probe the intangibles of the human journey. Acting as architectural elements, the sculpture offers a site for inquiry and becomes a place for understanding. Themes of absence and encagement are predominant - metaphorically suggesting the human urge to transcend physicality, declaring the immaterial through forms of escape. The sculpture acts as a metamorphic experience through mental performance for perceptual discovery and self-knowledge.
For more information about the Future Cities show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, which ended in October, please click here. Future Cities
A photograph by François Morelli of a performance he did is shown on the cover of the catalogue for the show.
Holly King
(excerpt from Thursday Report story published in January 2005)
Artist-photographer Holly King's world is a magical one in which the viewer steps out of time and space for a moment to imagine a landscape of beauty that almost seems to have come out of a dream.
It’s a world of light that glows with a spirit of mystery that infuses the landscape. But wait a minute, what exactly are we looking at? Is this a painting? Some hyper-real computer-generated image?
The reality behind Holly’s magic is that she creates elaborate miniature sets at her Eastern Townships studio, meticulously photographs them with a special camera using a larger than normal size negative and then supervises the production of a large-scale print.
“People bring their own imagination and memories” to her landscapes, Holly said in an interview. By printing the images so large, viewers “are almost able to step into these worlds.”
One of her large photos has been chosen for a mural in Concordia’s new Fine Arts-Engineering complex, which is nearing completion at the corner of Guy and Ste. Catherine Sts.
Holly’s piece, which will be at the entrance to the building on the métro level, was chosen after a competition organized by the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association (CUPFA).
She has been a part-time instructor in the Studio Arts department for 20 years, teaching painting and drawing as well as an ARTX course she helped develop that deals with visual language as content.
Holly has had 40 solo shows and has participated in about 60 group exhibitions. She has work in several museum collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, which organized a touring show of her work in 1998. Her work is also in several corporate collections, including those of Air Canada and London Life.
She was one of only three Canadian artists with a piece in the Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences show at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2000-01, an international exhibition that went on to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Familiar
Holly’s landscapes can seem very familiar. She said a few people told her at one show, “I’m from that area, I know it very well.” But she doesn’t intend for the illusion to be complete; she wants the viewer to be aware that the landscape is artificial, thus pitting “believability vs. artifice, and fabrication vs. illusion.”
Holly, who takes about a month to make each new landscape, doesn’t allow her sets to be photographed or exhibited. She starts with a drawing, inspired by various influences, including films, literary texts and references to art history. Then she paints her sky and makes trees out of clay, adding other materials such as tissue paper, plaster, wood and plastic.
The sets are quite simple. “It’s like going backstage at the theatre,” Holly said. “The actual objects are very humble. Photographing the sets transforms them.”
The reference to performance and theatre is important for understanding the evolution of Holly King’s work from her days as one of the pioneers in performance art in Quebec. She studied studio arts, first in Quebec City, at Université Laval, then at York University, where she did her master’s degree.
Her years as a performance artist included a show at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain when she was in her early 20s. She incorporated symbols inspired by psychology and Carl Jung’s work.
One performance that toured several cities featured Holly in a cage with a black wooden frame. She wore a two-sided costume, with a peacock on one side and “the beast” on the other, turning quickly from one character to the other as she paced about the cage.
Staged performances
She later created staged performances for the camera in a set she created, often adding architectural elements. Finally, she tired of using the human form and focused on photographing the landscapes she created. “I wanted viewers to feel they could step into this world I was creating rather than watch somebody else in that world,” she said.
This emphasis on stimulating the imagination of the viewer is particularly fitting for the mural photo Holly is creating for the university’s new building, where it will help link the worlds of the university and the city beyond its gates.
The Concordia piece, which is 14 feet high by 12 feet wide, is titled Seascape and the Sublime. It depicts a luminous sky in colours of turquoise and deep blue reflected into a sea that gently swirls and eddies. In the foreground is a large flat-topped landmass that invites the viewer to contemplate the seascape beyond.
Holly King is represented by Art Mûr in Montreal, a gallery where she had a show that ended in December 2004.
To see an image of Holly's work in Concordia University's Thursday Report, please click here: Image
