Pavitra Wickramasinghe
Time Machine
Main Gallery and Black Box
Richard Kerr
snap,crack,pop...(less about meaning than being)
York Corridor and Ste-Catherine St. W. vitrines
In Time Machine, multidisciplinary artist Pavitra Wickramasinghe explores the concept of time-travel and its implication of longing, regret and hope. She was inspired by the work of physicist Ronald L. Mallett and his theories of time-travel based on laser technology – in a sense using light as a time machine. For this project, she worked with imagery that provokes notions of traveling (in time and space) and the fluidity of place, using shadow as a stand-in for these notions.
“Shadows provide an opportunity for illusion, trickery and exploring perception as an integral part of understanding,” she writes. “It is proof that not all meaning can be created or displayed in light and indicates the absolute consistency of change and the impossibility of fixed meaning.”
Wickramasinghe is the 2011 Concordia University recipient of the Stephen and Claudine Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. The exhibition and publication of her catalogue The Book of Light and Shadows mark the conclusion of her two-year fellowship term.
The vitrines will show snap,crack,pop...(less about meaning than being) from experimental filmmaker and Concordia faculty member Richard Kerr. It will consist of several of his signature works from the series motion picture weavings as well as a new body of projections coupled with paint-based objects. This material iteration of the “spinning camera” technique Kerr created to present hypnotic and deeply formal concerns evoke Marcel Duchamp’s rotary reliefs and early machinist modernists like Jean Tinguely and his metamechanics.
The exhibition and a conversation with Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator and writer Brett Kashmere, will unpack Kerr’s particular path of constant production, described by Kashmere as a mix of aesthetic intensity/energy and patient observation/restraint that results in a fusion of abstraction and documentary styles.
Exhibition: Monday, April 15, to Thursday, May 24, 2013
Vernissage: Thursday, April 18, 2013, 5 to 7 p.m.
Catalogue launch: Thursday, May 9, 2013, 5 to 7 p.m.
Conversation, Brett Kashmere with Richard Kerr: Thursday, May 16, 2013 (location to be confirmed)
Where: FOFA Gallery, Room EV 1.715, Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, Sir George Williams Campus (1515 Ste-Catherine St. W.)
Admission is free of charge and everyone is welcome.
Related links:
• FOFA Gallery
• Department of Studio Arts
• Pavitra Wickramasinghe’s website
• Richard Kerr’s faculty profile (Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema)
• Richard Kerr’s website
