woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131In Tricia Middleton\u2019s Crones, an excerpt from a larger installation exhibited last year at Oakville Galleries, amorphous figures of wax seem to collapse on themselves, sagging and decaying amidst an assemblage of rocks, found objects, and detritus. Suggesting a site long abandoned, Crones<\/em> speaks to the obsessive byproducts of collecting, the smattering of things and materials that remain long after the spark of interest has passed. Middleton\u2019s labour of assembling and composing become past actions, now available in almost excavatory form, the viewer imagining the process of artistic production in addition to taking in Crones\u2019 experiential impact. This dynamic constitutes the basis of Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art<\/em> at Concordia University\u2019s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, a compelling group exhibition curated by art historian Amelia Jones.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nJones, a professor at McGill University and author of Body Art: Performing the Subject<\/em> (1998), has organized a diverse set of works around \u201cthe fact that making and experiencing art are always social, interrelational, dialogical practices, always in process and taking place over time,\u201d as she writes in the show\u2019s catalogue. Featuring work mostly by American, Canadian, and New Zealand artists, Material Traces<\/em> speaks to the already established yet continually ongoing dialogue between viewer and artwork. If Middleton\u2019s installation brings attention to the material process of its production, it facilitates an equally material intimacy between bodies and matter\u200a\u2014\u200aan intertwining of the body experiencing an artwork and the body having made the artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To this end, many of the exhibition\u2019s works respond directly to thematics of embodiment and medium, with the strongest work speaking to social contexts outside strictly formal considerations: Heather Cassils\u2019 Becoming an Image<\/em> documents a performance of the same name, wherein the artist pummelled an enormous mass of clay; Cassils connects the tiring work of art-making with the performative labour of non-normative gender expression, following her career-long interest in altering her own hyper-masculinized body. Paul Donald physically twists and molds generic store-bought 2 x 4s in Untitled (studs)<\/em>, cajoling the standardized commodity into a record of bodily manipulation. In his video installation FEUILLETON<\/em> Berlusconi Pasolini, Angel Vergara projects news footage of a physical attack on the former Italian prime minister, overlaid with video of the artist\u2019s hand directly painting on the screen. Avoiding the literally sweeping gestures of other direct-animation work, Vergara\u2019s brush dabs and strokes the screen, exposing a perceptual slippage between the bloody violence \u201con screen\u201d and his haptic brushstrokes equally \u201con screen.\u201d Vergara questions the (im)material physicality of the projected surface, and how it processes our political engagement with the social circulation of bodies. Material Traces<\/em> offers a thoughtful consideration of materiality\u2019s volatile status in contemporary social and artistic media ecologies.<\/p>\n