ALISON COOLEY
Arts Writer
From now to mid-April, the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery in the Murray Building is set to become a hub for the arts on campus. This week, graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts show season kicks off with exhibitions by Paul-Daniel Siemens, Jason Kwok and Nicole Charlebois.
This week’s shows feature works with diverse approaches and themes: from traditional woodblock carving to textile installation works, and from building a loving home to the apocalypse.
Eschaton
Siemens’s show consists of a number of vivid and colourful traditional etchings. Siemens uses a technique he calls “jigsaw drypoint.” It’s a process that combines the jigsaw technique for woodcuts with a traditional drypoint etching technique. Siemens cuts up thin aluminum etching plates, which then make up the coloured segments of the image.
“You can run a print in one pass without having to run it through (the printing press) for different colours,” Siemens explained. “For me that’s one of the fun parts of the project…. I feel like I kind of innovated this particular style.”
Siemens’ show is entitled Eschaton, a word rooted in theology that refers to the end of time.
Siemens uses iconic and symbolic images from Western mythology to explore the idea of the Apocalypse and examine how its manifestations have changed over time.
“Especially after the world wars, the apocalypse shifted (from) God descending on us to something that we would cause ourselves,” said Siemens.
Alongside his vibrant colour prints, however, Siemens pairs small black-and-white portraits, providing a moment of peace in the gallery.
“As far as theme goes, the Apocalypse is kind of… overdone. But it’s also intimately part of our consciousness. At any given time in Western history, we always think it’s the end of the world — immediately.”
Key Frames
Jason Kwok’s graduating show, Key Frames, is more inspired by current events. Kwok was struck by a story that has been in the news recently: Saskatoon’s title as the 9th most dangerous city in the world. Motivated by a desire to “show both sides of the story,” Kwok began to create large-scale woodcuts during the summer of 2009.
Kwok wants to examine cultural differences as a media framework. In doing so, like Siemens, Kwok pulls a number of cultural and mythological referents into his work. These elements are often subtle, but serve to highlight the biases inherent in mass media depictions of “the other.” By way of example, Kowk notes, “a cow is sacred in India, but in the West we eat it.”
In the case of a “violent” Saskatoon, Kwok argues that people don’t necessarily understand the cultural complexities of the situation.
For his large woodcut panels, Kwok uses a dremmel and an angle grinder to carve out sections of the block. While most woodcuts are printed, like stamps on paper, Kwok chose to expose his materials for his exhibition. Although Kowk admits to being influenced by the “clean crisp lines” of comic book illustration, he does not shy away from exposing the raw aspects of his work.
“I wanted to break away,” he said, “keep it really expressive.”
Merge
Nicole Charlebois works with a similarly laborious, yet expressive process. In her large-scale textile pieces, she works by selectively pulling fibres from the fabric to form an image. She begins by masking off an area, like a stencil, with bookbinder’s glue and then uses fine tweezers to extract the threads. What remains are intricate designs in the negative space of the material, often woven with thread and found objects.
“I’ve been working with fabric for the past 15 years,” Charlebois said, “but it’s definitely matured into more subtle work.”
The metaphor of weaving runs throughout Charlebois’s show, called Merge. While the organic forms in her work might refer to biology, as Charlebois explained “it’s more about people coming together.”
Charlebois, recently married, is interested in the process of negotiating the roles of everyday relationships: “It’s like merging lives, coming together… the complications of trying to fulfill many different roles in your life: student, daughter, mother, husband, wife. How do you compromise that and how does it weave a life for you?”
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photo of Jason Kwok’s exhibit: Robby Davis
