Exhibition Info

Sep 9 - Oct 14, 2010
10123 121 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5N 3W9

Wed-Fri | 12pm – 6pm
Sat | 12pm – 5pm

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Featuring works by: Paul Bourgault, Yann Pocreau, Lucie Robert, Geneviève Turcotte, Angèle Verret and acting curator Thomas Corriveau.

Curatorial Statement

This exhibition is the result of a three-month residency of six artists at Atelier Graff. Acting as curator, Thomas Corriveau invited these artists to explore a common theme involving a consistent truth in the art of printmaking, that is, the moment of transfer through pressure.

Paul Bourgault is producing large scale works, constructed in numerous successive layers. In the alternation between painting, collage and digital composition, he accumulates materials with numerous heterogeneous surfaces which he encrusts into the material of the work. In pressing these assembled fragments onto his work surface, it seems to distance us from all possibility of retracing their origin. We encounter an intense fusional chaos from which the artist brings forth a new order of images.

Yann Pocreau is working from an area of confined space, a space between a wall and a piece of furniture. His body appears in the space in a posture which suggests complete abandon: a human mass deposited on the ground, an immobile and silent heaviness. The photography is transferred into photoengraving, reworked using engraving tools, with the image appearing in concentrated form, which is new for the artist.

Lucie Robert uses the lithographic process to create a series of images that she recomposes through a process of folding, or in working with a sewing machine. The matrix is pressed onto the folds and the relief areas of the piece, and ink impregnates it with delicate nuances which reach the reverse side. The notion of the imprint is at the heart of her practice and her work weaves definite links between the mark, the drawn gesture, and the material presence of the image that supports it.

By imprisoning anink stain between two transparent slides, Geneviève Turcotte began her research with the approach of a scientific experiment. The pressure pushes the pigmented area around the periphery, creating a shape in which the boundaries and configuration are determined by the compressive force. The image is then subject to successive operations associated with diverse processes of printmaking: photography, photoengraving, digitalization etc, which bring out a multitude of new forms, with all of the imaginable alterations which could result from them.

Angèle Verret uses, as her point of departure, a sheet of used carbon paper covered with typing marks, writings and various scrawls. She fully examines the merest details, proceeding to diverse operations of enlargement, filtering and digital modulation to reveal the most minute inflections and surface relief. She thus introduces a new interpretational aspect revealing a poetic dimension which leans toward her practice in painting.

Thomas Corriveau is producing a series of serigraphy images on very thin paper. Wherever the colour is placed, the supporting material reacts to the humidity, contracting while drying, forming waves which sculpt the surface all around the printed figures. Consequently, these figures seem to dig into representational space and propose an aptness between their mode of appearance and the material presence of the image which supports it.

Betty Goodwin’s “Vests” series is behind the thinking that led to this exhibition. In the series, the flattening of the subject, so characteristic of the press, gives the images an extraordinary expressive presence. The suit, which seems to have been emptied by the power of the press of the body it covered, becomes a touching representation of absence. We take this opportunity to pay tribute to this artist whose work inspired and still inspire several generations of artists.

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