FEATURED 4th YEAR ARTIST: RORI BLANCHFIELD

Rori is an oil painter working with paper and wood panel. Her paintings play close attention to the human body and its connection to other bodies, places, and things. Through her painting process she finds and unfurls the quirky features of the mundane. These small moments become just as important as the finished work. She identifies and freezes peculiar movements in time and space, looking for subtle human gestures and movements that act in accordance with their surrounding environment. These gestures can create an odd moment when emphasized and speak to a deeper understanding of our behaviours with others and the emotional atmosphere created. For Rori, “Everyday people and their not-so-peculiar activities, ground us to our personal sense of home.”

FEATURED 4th YEAR ARTIST: MADISON REA

The discipline that is explored in Rea’s practice is sculpture, using mediums such as 3D printing, laser cutting, mould making, and found objects. Her work, call into question humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Exploring both ecological and technological systems and how these systems are interconnected. She specifically questions how domestication of our environment in the past and the present, has played into the power dynamics of the human versus nature relationship and how it contributes to our social climate today. 

GALLERY 115 IS PLEASED TO PRESENT: WHERE DO WE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?

March 12th - 21st

Featuring work by Laurena Finéus and Emily Janek, this exhibition is named after Paul Gaugain’s final painting. While both the artists are critical of Gaugain’s primitivist aesthetic, the themes raised in the work such as identity, belonging, and expectations resonate and connect the practices of these two artists. Finéus and Janek both work in their cultural heritage, with themes of religion, family and self discovery.

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BE SURE TO CHECK OUT ZHŌNG GUÓ MÈNG AT GALLERY 115 THIS WEEK

Jennifer Tang and Jinhui Wang’s duo show questions Chinese identities in a western context. The common point between the two artists is that they are of Chinese origin; however, the differences in the experiences they've had in their lives, and their understanding and interpretation of this subject are very different. Does an "ABC" (American born Chinese) who lives a Chinese-Canadian life shares the same experience of being Chinese as a Chinese international student coming to Canada? As China itself is a very complex country, regardless of the different points of view that Jenn and Jinhui took, the artists ask themselves the same question: is it enough to simply claim ourselves as Chinese?

FEATURED 4th YEAR ARTIST: PAULINE SEMAAN

Pauline Semaan’s paintings and mixed-media work depict bodies in various states of fragmentation. Through these divided figures, she explores the perplexing inner conflict between her tendency to be withdrawn, careful, and restrained, and her simultaneous desire to go beyond the comfort and security of self-imposed limits. Semaan’s surreal portrayal of subjects conveys the sense of disunity and unfamiliarity that can exist within that which should be intimate and familiar - the self.

GLOSSY FINISH: JULIA KLAN

https://www.instagram.com/glossy.finish/

Julia Klan: Everyday, women are bombarded with expectations of ideal beauty standards. Whether this be through social media influencers, celebrities or models, there is no escape from this overwhelming pressure. The negative impact placed upon women by today’s beauty ideals drove me to create an Instagram profile filled with videos of myself adhering to these ideals in a satirical manner. The purpose of each video is to exaggerate a look or feature that individuals are pressured to posses, such as plump lips or contoured cheekbones. It is hoped that these videos induce feelings of concern and confusion among viewers and insinuate to questions such as “am I good enough yet?” or “do I fit in now?”

FEATURED 4th YEAR ARTIST: ZIYU QIN

What did You Have for Dinner? is an interactive photo installation. Qin photographed herself eating dinner every night for one week turning the documentation from each meal into a single photo disk. Viewers can pick up these printed photo disks and attach them on a slowly revolving disk on the wall. This work explores Qin’s Chinese culture, her point of departure is the phrase “what did you have for dinner?” which is used in place of “how are you?”

Featured 4th Year Work: Ella Wright

Materia Medica, cyanotype, plexiglass, and mixed media, 2018.

Materia Medica takes place at the confluence of botany, traditional textile practices, plant-based medicine, and the history of institutional mental health treatment present at Kingston’s Rockwood asylum. Materia Medica questions the knowledge and histories that we privilege and deem as valid by employing the historic photographic process of cyanotype, incorporating traditional feminine practices such as embroidery and the healing use of plants, and contrasting this with modern laser-cut plexiglass vitrines. In doing so, the installation advocates for the recognition of practices traditionally maintained by women such as embroidery and plant-based healing. Moreover, Materia Medica urges for greater recognition of the lived histories and stories present in the landscapes we traverse every day.

GALLERY 115 EXHIBITS CORPUS LINGUA

Gallery 115 is pleased to present a solo show of paintings by 4th year BFA Martin Vuong from January 28th - February 8th 2019.

Vernissage:

February 2nd from 7 - 10 PM

Martin Vuong’s portraiture investigates the link between body, language and culture. Through surreal juxtapositions, Vuong explores cultural difference through idioms and phrases from multiple cultures. Running through Vuong’s work is an interest in the formal possibilities of painting and how these traits influence meaning.

FEATURED 4th YEAR WORK: KATE WYATT

TheREPATRIOTact, mixed repurposed media installation, 60"×72"×60", 2019

JOIN US FOR UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA PROFESSOR, JINNY YU’S EXHIBITION: I LIKE MY COUNTRIES AND MY COUNTRIES LIKE ME

Reception: January 24th, 6 PM 

Korean Cultural Centre, 150 Elgin Street, Unit 101, Ottawa

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/653740618414768/

Infused with nuance, Jinny Yu’s practice explores new possibilities for the medium of painting, while addressing questions of migration, belonging, and global movements. Yu is an associate professor of painting at the University of Ottawa. Yu exhibited work at the 56th Venice Biennale, and has shown in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

http://www.jinnyyu.com/

Swing by the Visual Art Building Tomorrow!

Find cheap art supplies and more. All the proceeds are going to this years 2019 Gradshow.

EXHIBITION in gallery 115: tipping pedestals, Ashley Guenette & Emily Neufeld, Opening Thursday January 10th, 6-9

Thursday January 10th
Gallery 115
600 Cumberland st
Department of Visual Arts

Gallery 115 is pleased to present the exhibition of fourth year BFA students Ashley Guenette and Emily Neufeld, Tipping Pedestals.

In TIPPING PEDESTALS, widely accepted tenets of art are challenged through different mediums. 

Ashley Guenette’s works target traditions of canvas painting, both in their process and presentation. Scrap fabrics sewn together create an uneven surface, a nightmare which most painters aim to avoid. The sculptural pieces, making use of very little actual paint, defy the intended use of the stretchers they are stapled to. 

Emily Neufeld’s installation of cut-outs expands the gallery space within and without, forcing viewers to explore their surroundings rather than being told where to look. The gallery loses its authority as a stage for art, and becomes an unwitting home to an infestation of childlike doodles.

FEATURED 4TH YEAR WORK: SARAH HODGSON

Fragmented pearls, playing cards, necklaces and other familial heirlooms populate Sarah Hodgson’s work, Familial Memento. This video installation work examines the relationship between painting and digital media. Sarah mimics the size of history painting, the abstract and gestural qualities of abstract expressionism, and the subject matter of the vanitas. Sarah utilizes photogrammetry processing, a method for creating 3D digitizations of objects, to explore the digital preservation and transience of family heirlooms, creating a vanitas suitable the 21st century.

FEATURED 4TH YEAR WORK: ATTICUS GORDON

Atticus Gordon’s work draws from the language of painting, sculpture and installation. This work, “assembly line for the production of fruit,” plays with the idea of systems and imaginative worlds. Atticus in interested in creating an over lying logic, or absurd logic, through the representation of repeating narratives of work, fruit, advertisement, and architecture that contribute to an imagined world.

FEATURED 4th YEAR WORK: Emilie Marcotte

Emilie Marcotte’s multimedia works of textiles, prose, photography and botany evokes craft, oral tradition, inheritance and familial connection through markers of rituals of making, repair, propagation and care.

Voix 2018 Exhibition Highlights: Nancy Lam

Nancy Lam's paintings exploring the racial fetish gaze will also be featured in this year's Fresh Paint: New Construction exhibition at Montreal's Art Mûr Gallery.
Nancy's paintings considers the cultural and social representations of East-Asia in conjunction with the perceived differences within the contexts of both Eastern and Western culture. Her work often explores the intricacies of identity and relationships, along with how East-Asian women are depicted within society and media. Nancy re appropriates images from various sources in order to create a new, often ambiguous narrative.

2018 Voix Exhibition Highlights: Alexander Muise

In his work, Alexander explores both personal and larger narratives of masculinity through representations of the male body. He focuses on concepts of love, loss, friendship, relationships, idealism, affect and affective response, and the ways in which identity is shaped and informed by them. By representing the body often in a form of self-portraiture or projection onto images of the male form, he examines the ways male identity is connected to affectivity and personal experience and how that can be read through the lens of contemporary art practice.

VOIX 2018 Exhibition HIGHLIGHTS: Emma Williams

Emma Williams took home the Dean's award for her exhibition works, one of which will be included in Dean Kevin Kee's collection at the Faculty of Arts.
Emma's work is focused on exploring and engaging with found images to evoke and obscure their representation. Emma expresses the emotion of an image she feels upon her first encounter with it in order to create a strange narrative or representation of the subject. Emma's representation of the subject questions their identity and temporality, while the setting creates a dream like landscape, a psychological space or a recalled memory.

voix 2018 exhibition highlights: Laura Baril

Referencing herself, as well as images of family members, Laura creates melodramatic narrative portraits which explore the development of identity through memory and the experiences of growing up. Through her paintings, she attempts to reveal and personify the anxieties that come with age, such as loss or trauma. A common theme in Laura’s paintings is the exploration of the body, through its deterioration, its many stages of development, and struggles with body image. She suggests that issues with body image can heighten one’s realization of their temporality.

Laura Baril will be showing her work in the 2018 Fresh Paint: New Construction exhibition at Montreal's Art Mûr gallery