“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.” —Rumi

There is something inside each one of us that, sometimes, is impossible to explain and define in precise words. However, this ambiguous something exists and acts. Sepideh Tajalizadeh Dashti, an Iranian woman who grew to adulthood in Iran and who now resides between Canada and the United States, has experienced deep feelings of ambiguity in her encounters with different cultural and social expectations. 

Not all diasporas are the same. Not all female experiences of oppression are the same. Dashti’s experience as an Iranian diasporic woman is fragmented along ethnic, religious, social, political, and class lines. These fragments pose challenges to her attempts to bind with others and find solidarity based in multiculturalism and ethnicity. Dashti establishes her body as an integral material in her art practices to make the explanation of her experiences and challenges possible. She seeks to claim her body across multiple media of performance, video, and installation. Dashti focuses on traumas that underscore both personal experience and engagement with larger sociopolitical structures of the phallocentric systems that exist in both her homeland and her host countries.

Representation is a crucial location of the struggle for any exploited and oppressed bodies asserting subjectivity. Dashti insists on reminding us to work against the silence and erasure of traumatic experience. “To Be Me” features contemporary representations of Dashti’s Iranian and immigrant identity formation. Works within this MFA thesis exhibition relay the immense struggles of living between places and cultures. Dashti explores her identity in the hope of calling oppressive authorities into question. Perhaps there is not much hope for a bright future where differences are recognized without eliminating the voices of others. But striving to make this future fosters hope-—both to endure and to continue.

...And on That Day, I Went for a Walk

A Virtual Exhibition by students in SA 2602A: Studio Seminar

Image from "This is a Dérive," courtesy of Makenzie Marie Ermel, Megan Lynn Goddard, Clementine Leong, and Noelle Mahoney

Diverted from destinations we went for a walk. Stirred by Ólafur’s Eliason’s Institute of Spatial Experiments, walking alongside the ghosts of Guy Dubord and the Situationists, we set out to explore thinking doing, to let slip the screens of charts and maps, and seek the open. Some ventured in groups, some alone; some during day, some during night; some guided by curiosity, some by the deflecting directives of Dérive apps uploaded to smartphones. We brought back personal notation of our encounters to share in small groups before individually fashioning artworks in response. The pieces presented here comprise a final rounding— a yield of three collaborative digital works formed from intersecting paths.

Interactive pdf of the exhibition (best viewed on a standard monitor), or view all three works below.

Course Instructor: David Merritt

The Universal Taco

On Ground

Matt W. Brown
April 19 – May 7, 2021
Artlab Gallery 

This series of paintings began as an effort to locate myself during a period of profound grief over the loss of my son, Ellis. Up until that time, I had been making drawings on the wall, but then loss tore through my life and suddenly the floor became my new workspace. I no longer stood erect to work on a vertical plane, but instead from my knees working horizontally. I folded paper into trays to contain coloured water and would wait for days to see what kind of patterns the evaporating water would leave behind on the paper’s surface. I would often spend time watching the suspended pigments mix in the water or sit and stare at tinted reflections of myself and my surroundings in the chromatic pools. I was becoming more of an observer as I distanced myself from the work. I allowed the materials I was using to act more autonomously under the laws of nature.

As the application of paint to paper was now mediated by evaporation over time, I realized that my hand was no longer directly involved in manipulating paint strokes but was rather most present in the folds I pressed into the papers’ surface.

A fold is a weakness, a wound running along the entire length of the substrate. A fold is a doubling over, a bend that leaves a scar. A fold is a condition that forces one thing to become something else. A fold is an awakening, showing an object in the second dimension that there is perhaps a third.

Through evaporation, these paintings are what remains of an imminent departure, something akin to empty containers, wrappers or envelopes. The water responsible for the markings left behind on the paper surface is removed, its invisible presence as vapour now called to mind through trace.

While these paintings were unquestionably born out of the numbness of grief after loss, they are also manifestations of a long-standing interest in process-based actions and outcomes. These paintings are a way of poking and prodding the environment around me in order to locate myself in a world in flux.

About the Artist
London artist Matt W. Brown explores incidence, colour, and implications of transition through works on paper. He has exhibited in Halifax at the Nova Scotia Archives, Anna Leonowens Gallery, RBC Waterside Centre, Eyelevel Gallery, and the Visual Arts Nova Scotia Corridor Gallery. In London, his work has been featured at Fringe Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Artlab Gallery, and McIntosh Gallery.

Brown received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with a major in painting. He is now completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Department of Visual Art, Western University.

Video tour of the exhibition narrated by Matt W. Brown. 

His House Will Leak

Sarah Charette, Ioana Dragomir, Philip Gurrey, Ana Moyer, Dong-Kyoon Nam, Sasha Opeiko, Tessa Oxtoby, Elena Solomon
April 19 – May 7, 2021
Cohen Commons

  
“In my telling, the Cyclops’ story is a revenge story….

While Odysseus is happily restored at home and publicly celebrated, the Cyclops’ story continues. She walks the vastness of his kingdom, slowly becoming a ghost. Her emptied socket becomes a mask. Her revenge feeds her, making her opaque, anti-gravity, a black hole. Odysseus is blind to her, no longer able to see the Cyclops as when he coveted her land and food. She hides in plain sight and crafts her haunting. She will orphan Odysseus as she has been orphaned, but not of family, land or body. She will strand Odysseus in constant unease, bereft of his cherished and clever reason. His house will leak. The walls will sag. He will dream of sheep. He and everyone around him will forget his name; he will become an unremarkable shadow of Nob’dy, the clever alibi and source of his fame.”

Eve Tuck and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.”

His House Will Leak is created by students in Professor Kirsty Robertson's graduate seminar, "Museum/Decay."

Video tour of the exhibition narrated by Ioana Dragomir.

 
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Fleet

Rebecca Sutherland
May 25 - June 11, 2021 

What do we lose through our continuous pursuits of permanence?

What might we be missing along the way?

Fleet makes use of floral material deemed commercially undesirable in a poetic and inventive collaboration with the passage of time and the shifting qualities of lived and imagined spaces.

Cooperating with the exigencies of time, the works in the exhibition highlight ceaseless movements towards inevitable forms of decomposition, pointing to the inherent delicacy and fragility of the natural world, and invoking similarities with human experience.

Here, reclaimed floral material is subjected to repetitive processes and forms of labour as a counterpoint to being left to naturally decay. These intentional processes transform the material at a stage prior to an expected moment of wilting and dissipation. Sometimes the petals are presented as themselves, mediated by repetition.

To engage with the impermanence of ephemeral materials is to allow the passage of time to play a significant role in the production of the work. The works in Fleeting enact processes of decay and deterioration, engaging with natural systems as real, as opposed to illustrative. The cyclical nature the works manifest from the studio into the gallery: in some instances a previous work’s dried petals are collected and manually ground into powder that is then repurposed within the installation.

Working with an ephemeral yet materially focused practice, the artist questions, “Why do we strive for permanence? Does this change how we interact with art? And how are we ever able to make peace with the fleeting nature of life?”

Video tour of Fleet from Rebecca Sutherland on Vimeo, produced by Anahí González and Tommy Bourque.

Photographs by Anahí González.

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Marvelous Monsters

Tommy Bourque
June 25 - July 16, 2021 

Marvelous Monsters presents speculative worlds and speculative figures. This immersive exhibition of installation works by Tommy Bourque evokes physically and psychologically visceral feelings of tension through dynamic, antithetical and aesthetical relationships. Constructed scenarios present subtle and extreme opposites. Sculptural objects and bodies are complemented or animated by digital technology to explore aspects of the (post)human and provoke emotional responses in viewers to contrasting effects, inspiring ambivalence or confusion.

To what extent can we relate to experiences that purposefully elicit adverse and emotional continuums of sensations? Bourque’s scenes are investigations for considering the viewer’s reactions when faced with familiar—yet deconstructed—vessels in which they, too, reside. Visitors are presented with a dilemma of contrasting signifiers and must consciously negotiate the works while discerning their relationships with their own bodies. The fragmented body is the foundational core of Bourque’s practice, and the synecdoche is central, even (or especially) when it is overtly abstracted: (re)enforced by teeth, hair, heads, spines, and/or limbs. Viewers encountering these scenes may succumb to their individual physical reflexes, natural bodily reactions, and unconscious drives.

André Breton asserts in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1927), “[T]he marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” In this regard, Bourque views his sculptural creations as both monstrous and marvelous, as wonderfully frightening. Each piece exemplifies the same overall goal of his practice: Bourque wants his work to mirror what it is like to be alive. He wants viewers to connect and engage with his work to confront their understanding of their own embodiment and of their own lived experiences as bodies and in bodies. 

View a digital tour of the exhibition above, and a floor map of the exhibition.

Read Ana Moyer's accompanying exhibition essay, "Sentient Surrealism: Examining the Postmodern Art of Tommy Bourque."

The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado

Anahí González
August 3 - 20, 2021

The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado explores themes of Mexican migration in Canada, engaging with ideas of human labour and various indexes of Mexican culture, trade, and economic exchange. With two simultaneous exhibitions in two locations: the Artlab (London, ON, Canada) and El NODO (Saltillo, COAH, Mexico), the show echoes the importance of creating a visual narrative between both countries to decenter the United States narrative concerning Mexican migration.

Working with cardboard boxes from Latin Markets in Ontario as a sign and cipher of an absent subject of labour, González brings attention and critiques to how the system of powers perceives Mexican labour as mobile, multi-purpose, temporary, and disposable.

To see both exhibitions virtually, visit www.theotherneighbour.com

Anahí González is a Mexican photographer based in London, Ontario, where she is completing her MFA in Visual Arts at Western University. She explores alternative visual narratives related to Mexican migrants and labour in Canada.

González received her BA in Communication Studies from the Universidad del Valle de México in 2016. In 2017, she worked as a cinematographer with the Mexican director Busi Cortés for a research documentary funded by the CEIICH-UNAM. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and screenings in Mexico, Norway, Canada, Spain, and France. The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado is her graduate thesis exhibition. Visit the artist's website.

 View a floor map for the exhibition here.

Artist and Western PhD candidate Andreas Buchwaldt explores the geographic and sociopolitical contexts of Anahi’s work in an excellent essay, available to read here. Responding to Anahi’s subject matter, Andreas has designed the text to interface with a cardboard box. The essay has been translated into Spanish by Western PhD candida Maria Laura Flores Barba (Dept of Languages and Cultures).

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