Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

COMBINE 2012  is the 27th annual exhibition of Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts undergraduates. The exhibition includes a variety of media: photography, sculpture, drawing, video and installation. Juried by current and past coordinators of the student-run VAV Gallery, the assembled works demonstrate a broad spectrum of aesthetic and technical concerns, reveal current interests in contemporary art, and showcase an unparalleled vitality.

The exhibition is paired with a catalogue written by Department of Art History undergraduate students. The entries are overseen and copy-edited by Dr. Anna Waclawek, art history departmental coordinator, and Michel Hardy-Vallée. The catalogue is designed by undergraduate students under the guidance of Nathalie Dumont, associate professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts.

Throughout this discursive project, the scope of creative practices within the Faculty is illuminated as it brings the participating undergraduate students into a professional and fully public realm.

Exhibiting Artists

Sophie-Anne Bélisle, America Blasco, Kevyn Durocher, Kandis Friesen, Emy Gagné St-Laurent, Simon Grenier-Poirier, Simon Larivière, Hélène Latulippe, Nicole Levaque, Jessica Monuk, Marlee Parsons, Aidan Pontarini, Melodie Reay, Laura Rokas, Alexis B. Rourke, Ingrid Tremblay, Feliz Tupe

Art Historian Writers

Katrina Caruso, Erika Couto, Clinton Glenn, Tess Juan-Gaillot, Adrienne Johnson, Katerina Korola, Pamela MacKenzie, Aditi Ohri, Raissa Paes, Mirka Parenteau, Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham, Pascal Robitaille, Amira Shabason, Emma Siemens-Adolphe, Angela Simone, Evan Stanfield, Florence Vallières

Publication Designers

Patrizia Bayer, Catherine Bisaillon, Camille Pomerleau-Lacasse

Psychic Cell Readings is a performance wherein the psychic, dressed in a lab coat, uses a microscope to analyze a client’s cells collected by cheek scrapping. Intimate conversations take place in the gallery as the magnified image of the cells are projected onto a nearby wall, visible to the client and other gallery visitors. This cellular analysis is intended to answer concerns, hopes, and fears of the clientele in relation to their future health. Wellbeing has been transformed by technological advancements to the effect of caching and displacing a personal awareness of health into the health-care system. This audience-participatory performance brings one’s notions of detrimental genetic heritage to the forefront as well providing psychological countermeasures taken to prevent illness. The performance remnants of business cards, glass slides and coverslips, methylene blue (cell stain), toothpicks and prescription notices will be available throughout the duration of the show as the “office” of the cell reader.

Friday, November 30

• 12:00–1:00 p.m.
• 2:00–4:00 p.m.
• 5:00–7:00 p.m.

Etj Kjenn Nijch Plaut'dietsch¹ is a performance and sound-based installation in dialogue with the work of Herman Rempel, author of the first Mennonite Plaut'dietsch (Low German) dictionary, titled Kjenn Jie Noch Plaut'dietsch? ². The focus of the work is an endurance-based audio performance, in which Rempel's voice is heard saying each word in the dictionary out loud, with the artist quickly repeating each word after him, a six-hour pedagogical exercise and rhythmic duet with Rempel's ghostly vocal recordings of the lexicon. Focusing on the technological and cultural infrastructures used to preserve and teach language, (and so, also, culture), Etj Kjenn Nijch Plaut'dietsch functions as a sort of failing, frail and futile monument to those who are working to preserve and animate the (mostly) dying Plaut'dietsch language through online, text-based, and oral means.