After almost two years, Dawson's Fine Arts Department's 2020 Visual Arts Graduates are pleased to present how their practices have flourished and prospered, while staying true to their understanding of Eudaimonia.*

* Originating in Aristotelian ethics, eudaimonia is the condition of human flourishing or of living well. Aristotle used eudaimonia as the term for the highest human good, an objective standard of 'happiness,' based on what it means to live a human life well.

UNMASKED reveals the creative results of a two year formative process in the face of pandemic. It is marked by resilience and captivating visuals.

The students write, “we started off this program as enthusiastic photographers, eager to learn and step into the real world. However, the global pandemic soon made us unsure about our future. It was the immense help and support of our program coordinators, teachers and technicians that made this program a success.

Out of the Blue is the first of two exhibitions of third-year students’ work in the Dawson Professional Photography Program. This collection of works represents a variety of photography genres, as each student explores their area of interest for their 5th-semester portfolio. After a year and a half of limited access to the college, this group of emerging professionals are finally back full-time to master their craft. Their return to the studio has left them feeling that they have finally moved Out of the Blue.

Other Landscapes presents several multimedia works from Montreal-based Iranian artist Anahita Norouzi. It stems from her long-term research interest in the cross sections of botany and colonial politics, experiences of immigration and displacement, as well as issues of identity and memory.

Taking the form of a multimedia installation, the project results from a collaboration between the artist and eight refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Norouzi writes: ‘As a way to get closer to their stories, I focused on the objects that they brought with them on their journey.

Counterpart stems from an assignment Photography faculty members Peter Berra and David Hopkins introduced in their 2019 Photo Studio 2 class: photograph another student who is a stranger. Afterwards, Berra compiled these images into a portrait of both individual and collective identity, in all its beauty, poignancy, and complexity.

The act of looking at oneself reflected on a screen, or through a lens, is inherent to the production of portraiture.  As many of us spend our days staring at ourselves on screens in endless Zoom meetings over endless hours, how we appear, how long we gaze and measure our own image(s) is occurring at an almost unprecedented, and probably unhealthy scale.

In this 20 minute compilation, David Baumflek has thoughtfully selected work by six second-year Visual Arts students:  Marina Diolaiti, Ariane Labbé, Camille Mota, Linda Dao, Jennifer Orr, and Sabrina Perrotti. 

In culmination of two years of extraordinary perseverance and dedication, thirty three Visual Arts students present their work in the gallery and the exterior vitrines.

Opening Events Friday, May 28th:

5 pm: Zoom Awards Ceremony: https://dawsoncollege.zoom.us/j/92470440611

5:30 pm:  Digital exhibition vernissage: https://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/vernissage/

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s distinguished interdisciplinary practice unfolds via durational, live, live-streamed, and private performances at times resulting in drawings, photographs or installations. In these performances, she models and hybridizes herself to defuse expectations of beauty and explore the effects (and affects) of the concerned gaze on an unfolding identity as it is observed and analyzed by herself and others. Seeking to confront desires and ideals (aesthetic, commercial, sexual, etc.) through an empowered and performative manipulation of her own image, she intrinsically questions the labour of making and becoming;

Thirza Cuthand: Reclamations brings together a selection of work by this acclaimed artist, writer, and performer spanning over two decades and exploring with brutal honesty the humour and pathos in her life as a ‘bipolar butch lesbian of Plains Cree and Scottish descent.’   Since her first film about life as a lesbian in her Saskatoon high school drew international success, her short, low-budget, experimental videos explore autobiography and identity, the effects of racism and colonization, sexism, ageism, and issues surrounding mental health.

The works in this exhibition, The Weight of Delirium, were selected from two different bodies of my art of the last decade:  Delirious at the Borderlines (2012-13), a series consisting of both drawings and digital prints, and The Weight (2016-17), a collection of more than fifty iterative mixed-media drawings.

It seems appropriate to combine the two for this exhibition because both collections of work rely on metaphor and allegory to portray crisis.