Stay | Flame: Postcard from my home (sound on)
Visit Exhibition Here
Site Visit Pivoting around the symbolism, associations and format of the postcard and carte de visite, this exhibition is a collective project that brings together artists from around the world to share and celebrate intercultural connection and artistic engagement. The title SITE VISIT refers to the importance of place, but also to the way we now visit online sites in place of physical meetings. It is a play on words with carte de visite as well as a play on the dynamic of sight/site and being in a place physically or virtually. This exhibition hopes to bring together artists from around the world with a shared understanding of the power of place, creative power and a nostalgia for the people and conversations that were had, at a time when we could be together in person.
Postcards are ways that we can connect with each other, or connect ourselves with the place they’re from as keepsakes. Perhaps they connect us with the person we were ourselves, when in a particular place. Maybe it’s the only way we can purchase an artwork at our current budget - a photographic rendering on a small card - yet it is a way to bring a part of the trip and art back to our homes.
The carte de visite is one of the earliest examples of a postcard - where instead of a letter accompanied by small illustrations or keepsakes - an photograph and an accompanying caption was used to present a place, a people, an experience. The carte de visite was patented in Paris. It offered one of the earliest ways to record and keep memories of places through photography. The trend of collecting images and the portraits of loved ones, celebrities and places became ubiquitous through the carte de visite - because of its format and relative accessibility from being inexpensive. Adapted from a calling card, and later transforming into a business card, the carte de visite was a means of person to person connection, passed from hand to hand in its manageable size. In this way there is a divergence between the function of a carte de visite as a signifier of presence and meeting through exchange, and the postcard as a symbol of journeying and distance being travelled.
This exhibition is intended to become a continuous project connecting together artists from different continents, contexts and cultural experiences.
The proceeds from sales go directly to the artists, including 10% collected towards the residency scholarship fund to enable future artists to benefit from our programs.
Graphic design: Anastasia Venkova
Site Visit Pivoting around the symbolism, associations and format of the postcard and carte de visite, this exhibition is a collective project that brings together artists from around the world to share and celebrate intercultural connection and artistic engagement. The title SITE VISIT refers to the importance of place, but also to the way we now visit online sites in place of physical meetings. It is a play on words with carte de visite as well as a play on the dynamic of sight/site and being in a place physically or virtually. This exhibition hopes to bring together artists from around the world with a shared understanding of the power of place, creative power and a nostalgia for the people and conversations that were had, at a time when we could be together in person.
Postcards are ways that we can connect with each other, or connect ourselves with the place they’re from as keepsakes. Perhaps they connect us with the person we were ourselves, when in a particular place. Maybe it’s the only way we can purchase an artwork at our current budget - a photographic rendering on a small card - yet it is a way to bring a part of the trip and art back to our homes.
The carte de visite is one of the earliest examples of a postcard - where instead of a letter accompanied by small illustrations or keepsakes - an photograph and an accompanying caption was used to present a place, a people, an experience. The carte de visite was patented in Paris. It offered one of the earliest ways to record and keep memories of places through photography. The trend of collecting images and the portraits of loved ones, celebrities and places became ubiquitous through the carte de visite - because of its format and relative accessibility from being inexpensive. Adapted from a calling card, and later transforming into a business card, the carte de visite was a means of person to person connection, passed from hand to hand in its manageable size. In this way there is a divergence between the function of a carte de visite as a signifier of presence and meeting through exchange, and the postcard as a symbol of journeying and distance being travelled.
This exhibition is intended to become a continuous project connecting together artists from different continents, contexts and cultural experiences.
The proceeds from sales go directly to the artists, including 10% collected towards the residency scholarship fund to enable future artists to benefit from our programs.
Graphic design: Anastasia Venkova
Asymmetrical Dress
Nicole used her body, pattern-making and its relationship to drawing to make a series of staged photographs and prints featuring a one armed dress.Sculptor-fashion designer Chana Orloff inspired this work.
The Fragile Power of Drawing
2021 Paris,France
drawing, sculpture, photograph
2021 Paris,France
drawing, sculpture, photograph
About the Exhibit:
The Fragile Power of Drawing
- LAiR Arts InternationalFor over a century now, artists from all over the world have been flocking to Paris for inspiration. Those seeking to satisfy their passion for drawing attended the independent art academies of Montparnasse, which offered intellectual and artistic freedom from the constraints imposed by the fine art schools of the time.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, artists from abroad also spent countless hours studying works held in museum collections. Chaïm Soutine's still lifes were influenced by the works of Chardin and Rembrandt in the Louvre, while its Egyptian collection inspired Modigliani and Zadkine; Marc Chagall’s struggles for modernity drew on Delacroix’s art.
An essential part of the production process for many artists, drawing was historically overshadowed by the monumental mediums of sculpture and painting. Yet in the context of contemporary art, drawing is re-emerging as a powerful medium of its own.
Our Drawing Research Residency seeks to pursue this tradition of drawing research: participants in the 2020/21 residency were invited to explore the online collections of three Paris museums and make a drawing or series of drawings inspired by any work or group of works they choose. The studio-museums of the sculptors Ossip Zadkine, Chana Orloff and Antoine Bourdelle contain many treasures reflecting the richness and variety of the Ecole de Paris, that may be freely reinterpreted from a contemporary point of view. In the spirit of the experimental art academies and ateliers of Montparnasse, all drawing styles, techniques and materials were permitted, in dialogue with the past.
- Rahma Khazam
“score to perform” is a collaborative video formed around notions of communication. Artists Rita Evans and Nicole Shimonek experiment with a
performative score and subsequent set of parameters to create work at the time
of COVID-19 exhibited and juxtaposed alongside one another.
Octavia
Butler’s “Speech Sounds” is a starting point for the collaboration, reflecting
on how, in the story, a pandemic takes away a civilization’s capacity to
communicate in written and spoken language. People communicate through gesture
using symbols to introduce themselves to one another.
This
work questions around what new languages are potentially formed with the
technologies we are all currently using, what is lost and what is gained across
this medium. It relays around ideas of the politics and proximity of touch and
how this effects the human body. Funded by the Manitoba Arts Council.
