The States of Becoming
Amir Atouani, Andrea Vargas Alonso, Charlotte Ghomeshi, Claude Labrèche-Lemay, Clothilde Allen, Katarina Riopel, LeDor, Loïc Chauvin, Lucia Giron, Madison Safran, Matthew Daly, Maxime St Jean, Pierre de Montalte, Raheleh Salim, Remi Martel, Renaud Lafreniere, & Sasha Pozzolo
LE LIVART
April 4 - April 15, 2018
The varying works in this group of emerging artists collectively interrogate the status of the photographic image. In some, their work questions a personified relationship with making, while others take on a narrative approach. The resulting images are embodied, meticulously constructed, and rooted in the experience of photographic thinking. In conversation, they exemplify photography’s interdisciplinary tendencies and uphold the collective understanding that the language of images matters. As a result, the photographic is unbound and free, it has a status that is complex and ubiquitous as it is vying for our attention. In this exhibition, the photographic becomes an artist’s position as it remedies the world into an accessible format for contemplation and consumption.
Beyond the material implications of presenting dimensional surfaces, photographs orient process through objects, sites, and the body as compositional exposures of time. In doing so, these artists navigate alchemical structures of becoming toward a contextual turn of the photographic lens that gives new shape to previous forms. They embody an articulated retention of the image through an expansive formalism reliant on the referent and rooted in subjectivity. Yet these positions are fundamentally the same. In conversation, these photographers have questioned and interrogated their own individual interpretations amid one another’s photographic sensibilities. Together, they have informed perspectives that move beyond a singular interpretation of photography towards the plural interdisciplinary structures uncovered as unifying states of becoming. The photographs become a format for expression to be understood, to be looked at, and that draws from the indexicality of the past towards an unfolding of the contemporary. In working through their practices, they are positioning themselves within a cannon that is grounded in an ideological framing of a photographic education that interrogates the status of the image as states of becoming.
Curatorial text by Patryk Stasieczek.
Vitamine Scout is a year long exhibition project organized by soon to be graduating undergraduate students enrolled in the photography program within the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. This project is curated and coordinated by visiting faculty Patryk Stasieczek with the support of his teaching assistant Matthew Brooks and the seventeen students enrolled in the course.